Word Up: Oha! and Hä?

Maybe I have been spending too much time in Germany with speakers under the age of 10, but two words I hear a lot of are "Oha!" and "Hä?"  These belong to the great class of words known as interjections.  Basically, if you're in the habit of talking with your mouth full, you will find the interjection much more useful than the phrase or sentence.

To clarify these German examples: "Oha!" is kind of like a cross between "Uh oh!" and "ah ha!" People who have already read their way through the collected works of Dick and Jane might be more inclined to say something like "Really?" or,  for the less erudite, "Oh, shit!"  (Although, of course, in German, as pretty much everyone knows thanks to either Lady Gaga or some weird kid from middle school who was way too into World War II history, a more direct translation would be "Scheiße.")

Gaga-fandom aside, "Scheiße" is another word the under-10 set use very freely without ever once raising the eyebrows of caretakers and surrounding parents.  That freedom, of course, does not apply when translated back to English, a fact that some Germans have failed to note.  One colleague even uses the word "shitloads" as a direct synonym for "many" in any and all contexts.  That's funny when you're talking about how many chicken wings you ate last night, but less so when you're discussing how many new reading materials need to be ordered for the coming school year.

Of all things lost in translation, swear words are one group that is almost impossible to explain to a non-native speaker.  For one thing, I am constantly surprised by the very liberal use of the f-word on German television.  Seriously, these production companies need to send their editors on a road trip across the elementary school parking lots of North America in a convertible equipped with great speakers and a tapedeck full of uncensored Top 40.  Let's see how comfortable they feel dropping the f-bomb in the after-school programming slot after the rage of the PTA has rained down on them.  On The Voice of Germany, one of the nominally English-speaking judges uses the f-word to ramp up his descriptions of everything from pretty bad to pretty good singing.  And I thought that kind of show was made for family viewing - I mean, if it's not appealing to tweens, who else could possibly be watching?

As for "Hä?", in that uncomplicated world without umlauts that the English language has made a reality, it would probably be spelled more like "Heh?" (Poor Germans - in their comic books, even dastardly witches have to cackle with diacritical markings.)  It basically describes the state of confusion summed up by the expression "huh?", only with European flair.  Try it.  It's pretty fun to say.  Hä? Hä. Huh.