German Joys

Factoids on Hope and the Brothers Grimm

• If you're not visitin Bouphonia's glorious Friday Hope Blogging, you should start now.  Bouphonia also has something for the sea-slug fans out there.
• Also, the Brothers Grimm German dictionary can be found online here.  It starts with a hymn of praise to the letter A as the "noblest and most fundamental of all sounds, sounding fully from the throat and breast, and which the child learns first."
• Jonathan Rutherford and Zygmunt Bauman have essays on the culture of capitalism and privatization which can be downloaded from Soundings here.

This Week's Factoids on Language, Consulting and Computers

• According to a friend of mine who works for a consulting company, one of their gags involves ordering workers to break up into teams, and then perform an exercise which involves each of them writing one or two words from a particular sentence on a index cards, until the entire sentence has been formed.  The sentences they use? "Caring parents are to be admired" and "Loving children are to be admired."
• Possibly the longest debate on German Anglicisms on this or any other Internet can be found in a discussion forum of the online dictionary LEO right here (g).  For an amusing short story composed almost entirely of French imports into English click here.
• Windows Vista has built-in speech recognition capability, which actually works amazingly well, no joke!  Just go to Control Panel, then Speech Recognition.  Why was I not informed of this long before?

Hashish, Hitchens, Heaven

• A friend of mine yesterday told me that her acupuncture doctor here in Germany plunges needles tipped with tiny balls of hasish into her pressure points.  According to her, "Dr. Wang's entire office reeks of hashish."  Also, it feels soooo goooood.
• Ed Philp recently sent me this joke: "A busload of people from different nations arrives at Heaven’s gates.  A sign says "Heaven -- turn left.  Lectures About Heaven -- turn right." The Germans all head to the right.
• The fine Spiegel cover story on the "new atheists," which was announced by the classic cover "God is to blame for everything!" (see left), characterizes Christopher Hitchens as the "English Hans Magnus Enzensberger," which seems about right to me.  Both are public intellectuals with a claim to have read everything, both migrated away from the left, both write tartly ironic prose, and both surprised many onlookers by supporting the Iraq war.

Fast. Faster. Joy.

This blog's been getting a bit long-winded. Time to learn from the tabloids: the news you need, in the time you have. Presenting German Joy Factoids:

• Fact: According to Titanic, German ambulance drivers have a private lingo in which they refer to doctors as "Druids" or "Higher Beings," depending on the particular ambulance firm. Epileptic attacks, however, are universally called "Dirty Dancing." In English.
• Fact: In the television series Ma Famille from the Ivory Coast, an entire stretch of episodes during which one character complains of physical pain is called De quoi souffre Bohiri ? (What is Bohiri suffering from?). The next 2-part installment of the series is called simply: "Renal Insufficiency."
• Fact: Germany has just won the World Championship in Handball, which, according to this news story (G), has again plunged "the entire nation into World-Championship delirium!" The President and Chancellor called to congratulate the team.
• Fact: I don't even know what handball is.