14 or 40?

Being a bit of a pedant, I was somewhat irritated by the headline in the Guardian yesterday:

Coronavirus: returning Britons could be kept in quarantine for 14 days

Why the irritation? Because of the meaning of the word 'quarantine'. Even as far back as primary school, I learnt that the word originated in the mid 17th century, from the Italian word 'quarantina', which meant '40 days'.

As Wikipedia says: "The word quarantine comes from a seventeenth-century Venetian variant of the Italian quaranta giorni, meaning forty days, the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic."


So for me, when I hear the word 'quarantine', I think of 40 days and not 14. 

In a similar vein, when I hear the word 'September', I think of 7 and when I hear October, 
I think of 8. When, therefore, the Germans give a date as "der 07.08.2019", 
I always have to add 2 to the 8 to get October.

It can be annoying when you know the meaning of words.

What's the difference between...?

I'm currently struggling to get through The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class by Frederick Taylor. It's hard because there is just so much detail contained in this blow by blow account of how Germany got into such a financial state that, at one point, on 1 November 1923, one US dollar was worth 133 billion marks and on 15 November 1923, just a fortnight later, approximately 2.5 trillion marks. 

The most interesting bits describe how people of all walks of life and classes actually coped with everyday life.

One detail mentioned was that schoolchildren had to attend school on Saturday mornings, which they no longer have to do. Even I, however, remember that this was still the case until a few decades ago: school until about lunch time on Saturday. 

As I went to school in Wales, when I visited my grandparents in Berlin, the schoolchildren there were often still in school, their holidays starting a few weeks later. One year, when I was maybe in my early teens, Claudia Lehmkuhl, my friend from the next apartment building to my grandparents', invited me to join her on the last day of school as her English teacher wanted to have me in her classroom. 

When I was there, I was asked various questions and I'm not sure how many I managed to answer successfully, but I do remember one question that had me stumped.

The German English teacher fixed me in her gaze and said, "I've always wanted to know something. What's the difference between a sweater, a pullover and a jersey?"

I had no idea. I don't think the English teacher was impressed by my lack of knowledge.

When I returned home and reported back to my parents, my dad said: "She left one out: jumper."

Maybe today is the day that I should look up the definitions of these words and see if there are any major differences. From The New Oxford Dictionary of English: 

Sweater: a knitted garment, worn on the upper body, typically with long sleeves, put on over the head.
Pullover: a knitted garment put on over the head and covering the top half of the body.
Jersey: a knitted garment with long sleeves, worn over the upper body.
Jumper: Brit. a knitted garment, typically with long sleeves, worn over the upper body.

Conclusion? No difference whatsoever. 

And then there are Germans who want to argue with me that German has more words than English...https://dict.leo.org/german-english/pullover

Time passing

Today, I went to the dentist's (a Ukrainian woman) for a check-up and a bit of cleaning.

As I talked to the receptionist, who checked me off her list, I noticed a new dental assistant smiling very nicely at me.

After about 5 minutes in the waiting room, I'm called into the treatment room and asked to sit in the dental chair and as the new assistant puts the bib around my neck, she says: "Erkennen Sie mich noch?" ("Do you still recognise me?")

And I wanted to reply, "I'm sorry., but I can't remember you from the last time", when I suddenly look at her name badge and read 'Elif' and then I look at the surname 'Akyol'.

The last time I had seen Elif, she was about 6.5 or 7 years old. I remember going up the stairwell to my flat one floor above hers and her mum was standing at the door to their flat talking to someone. Elif rushed out of their flat towards me shouting, "Frau Jones, Frau Jones. Ich kann LESEN!" ("I can READ!")

So we sat on a step and she very proudly read to me out of the book she had been waving about in the air.

And now the small child is 18 years old, training to be a dental assistant and looking into my mouth. The poor thing.

Eleven and a half years seem to have passed and yet it only seems like three.

Personally, I still feel like 28 physically and 14 mentally and the only way I can really notice the passage of time is to hear how old the children in my life now are.

My sister's friend Susan - well, I've known her since she was 12 and I still can't imagine her any older than 17 or 20 and yet she now has three children in their late teens. How is this possible when I still don't feel like a grown-up myself?

It's a mystery to me where all this time goes.

My favourite German word - as regards meaning

As a translator from German to English, I have to deal with the German language every day. I've also read a whole shedload of books on the German language and the changes it has been subjected to. 

Over time and with experience, I've come to the conclusion that the best new German word is...Verschlimmbesserung.

It's a portmanteau word that unites 'verschlimmern' and 'Verbesserung'. 

The verb 'verschlimmern' means 'to aggravate' or 'to make worse'. The noun 'Verbesserung' means an 'improvement'.

The word 'Verschlimmbesserung' means an improvement that actually makes things worse.

The longer I live, the more I see examples of this. One famous one is the German spelling reform (or 'orthography reform' to give it its proper title), which took place in 1996. Until then, there had been certain phrases, for example, that were written with small letters, e.g. 'im voraus' = in advance; im großen und ganzen = on the whole. The reason the words were all written with small letters was that they were not to be taken literally. 

However, the reformers reasoned that as the word 'im' was in the phrase, it implied that what came after it was a noun so the word had to be written with an initial capital letter - just like all nouns in the German language. 

There were other changes that you could just about grasp the argument behind. 

Since then there have been 'refinements' to these new rules. In 2004, 2006, 2011 and 2017. 

And now, no-one is really sure of how to spell German words any more. This means, therefore, that a reform intended to simplify spelling has just cause more chaos than ever before.

A real Verschlimmbesserung.

Got any other examples of such a phenomenon? Feel free to comment.