In praise of the Kindle

I am an inveterate reader and always have a few books on the go at the same time. Sometimes, though, there are books that I want to read and just can't get my hands on at the English and German libraries in town.

One such book was Can You Forgive Her by Anthony Trollope, the first in his political series of novels. In the end, I decided to re-join the local university library for the measly sum of EUR 14 a year. To my delight, it did have the book I wanted.

However, when I went to return the book and borrow the second in the series, I had no such luck. The only copy of Phineas Finn there was not allowed to be removed from the library - too old.

In the end, though, I happily managed to track down a copy of it online. Because of a row over 8 books that are still subject to copyright in Germany, all of the Project Gutenberg website is barred to anyone in Germany, but there are alternatives.

I thus read Phineas Finn on my Kindle. Now, there are a lot of readers who exclaim that they could never, ever read anything on an e-book. They can only read 'real' books.

Me? I think the text is the thing and don't care if it's a paper book or an e-book - just let me get my hands on the text.

And there are so many advantages to a Kindle. For one thing, it comes with two massive dictionaries, so that you can either look up a word in the text without leaving the page, or enter the two dictionaries and poke around there. Wonderful.

A second advantage is that your poor tired hands don't have to constantly struggle to keep something the size of a small loaf of bread open all the time.

And finally, there is the advantage of a flat screen - no shadows cast by the light onto the pages.

What's not to like?

If you would like to read some classic books and you can't get to Project Gutenberg in Germany, here's an alternative website that I have recently come across (sadly only English books):

https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/index.html

Too smug, too soon

This year, I've heard lots of women in my walking group talk with amazement about how their geraniums are still flowering - in January!

I can confirm this. My five geraniums are also blooming and putting out new flowers and leaves.

Normally, I put some branches from Christmas trees along the back of the window boxes, between the box and the balcony railing, to protect them from the cold and up to now, the flowers have survived the autumn, December and the start of January, but in the middle of that month, there is usually a frost, a bit of snow and they poor things go black and start to rot.

How smug I felt when, last week, in the second half of February, I removed some of the branches as we'd not had any frost, any snow, any temperatures below zero and my plants were merrily flowering just as much as they do in the summer. I genuinely thought that the worst of the winter was over. In fact, there have been a couple of days with a scent of spring in the air.

Imagine my surprise when I looked out of the french windows in the bedroom this morning and noticed something white on the lawn next door. Surely not?!

Yes, it was snowing. I had to rush out on the balcony and put the branches that I had merely dropped onto the balcony floor (I'm not that tidy) back into the window boxes to shroud the poor plants.

As they say, pride comes before a fall and I hope my pride in getting my geraniums through the winter and the worst month of the year (January) won't mean the demise of my pretty plants. Poor wee things.

Die Ziffer - always makes me think of James Bond

Two days ago, on Saturday, I went to order a notebook for use in my new evening class. The idea behind buying such a thing is to enable the class to watch online videos as projected onto the whiteboard by the digital projector.

When the sales assistant took down my contact details, I had to spell my e-mail address. As there are so many Joneses in the world, my e-mail address includes a number.

I spelt out the address and then said, "Und dann die Ziffer 4" ("And then number 4"). 

"Ziffer" means the individual number; you would never use it in the word "telephone number", for example. 

Every time I use the word, I think of James Bond, as Le Chiffre was one of the baddies in the first Bond book: Casino Royale. The role of the paymaster of the "Syndicat des Ouvriers d'Alsace",  a SMERSH-controlled trade union, was last played by the delectable (in my eyes at least) Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen in 2006 

And, of course, the name is very appropriate for a mysterious character as it as the root of the English verb "to decipher", which means to translate something from code into normal language.

I quote from the Online Etymology Dictionary

cipher (n.)

late 14c., "arithmetical symbol for zero," from Old French cifre "nought, zero," Medieval Latin cifra, which, with Spanish and Italian cifra, ultimately is from Arabic sifr "zero," literally "empty, nothing," from safara "to be empty;" a loan-translation of Sanskrit sunya-s "empty." Klein says Modern French chiffre is from Italian cifra. 

The word came to Europe with Arabic numerals. From "zero," it came to mean "any numeral" (early 15c.), then (first in French and Italian) "secret way of writing; coded message" (a sense first attested in English 1520s), because early codes often substituted numbers for letters. Meaning "the key to a cipher or secret writing" is by 1885, short for cipher key (by 1835).

And that, folks, is why I always get a bit of a thrill when I use the German word "Ziffer".

Ash Wednesday - the end or the beginning?

Even though I've lived in Germany for so long, it never fails to amaze me how the same dates can mean different things in the two countries of Germany and Britain.

Take, for example, 11 November. In Germany, it's a day associated with fun, since it's the day that kicks off the Carnival season, also known as 'the fifth season'. It's a time of partying and dressing up, a time that enlivens the drab days of winter. Its culmination is Rosenmontag (Rose Monday), a day of parades and silly costumes, of sweets being thrown into the crowds lining the streets, of Carnival songs and lots of drink. The hardest bit of the partying starts on the previous Thursday and finishes 4 days later.

In the UK, however, the 11th day of the 11th month is probably the most solemn of the entire year as it's the day on which the British remember the dead of all the wars. It's not a day of fun at all. And the disparity in the way both nations treat this day shocks me every time.

Yesterday, I went to my sketching and drawing classes and in each class, someone asked whether there would be a lesson next week. The VHS (adult education college) is taking a break over the Carnival weekend. Both times, the teacher said, "Yes, there'll be a lesson. Next Wednesday is Ash Wednesday. Everything will all be over by then."

Now for me, Ash Wednesday is just the beginning - not of the party season but of Lent. Ash Wednesday is the start of the serious bit of spring, not the end of the fun bit of winter.

Anyway, as I usually do over Lent, I shall be giving something up as a test of my willpower. It took some time to figure out what I wanted to give up this year. Often, it's been crisps and chocolates, but as I don't eat much of either any more, that would be no big deal.

I hereby officially state that, as of Ash Wednesday, I shall be foregoing anything to do with rice and potatoes AND.... reading online newspapers after 9 a.m. I spent much too much time reading and commenting on The Guardian and Daily Mail newspapers and there are better things that I could be doing with all that time...such as MOOCs and Duolingo.

I am already mentally girding up my loins for the ordeal.

Manager - what a misnomer

Once again, I am feeling resentful at being handed work after 4 p.m. - when I've been sitting in front of my computer since 8 a.m. - with the demand to send the finished translation in by 9 a.m. the next day.

And there are another two clients who have also sent work late in the afternoon and who want it done by tomorrow morning. As usual, everything is urgent. Everything has to be translated at virtually the last minute.

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: managers - they don't seem to be able to manage time at all.

They're out!

One of my favourite programmes on BBC Radio 4 has long been Gardeners' Question Time, or GQT, as its most ardent fans call it.

Heaven knows why, as I've never had a garden of my own.

In my previous flat, I asked the landlord if I could take over the garden and was allowed one of the long flowerbeds. The other one was tended to by another family with a fondness for my least favourite flower: begonias. Ugh.

Anyway, since moving to this place in 2008, all I've had is a long balcony and I usually have up to 21 different species of plant in the window boxes and tubs there.

However, this still isn't enough to appease my itch for soil so, over the last couple of years, I've done some 'guerrilla gardening' - undercover gardning in the street in front of this building before the sun comes up at the weekend.

Now, I have a terrible touch when it comes to bulbs and it's been that way ever since I tried planting them as a child in the parents' garden. They've always disappeared. I've even used rulers to measure the right depth, as recommended on the bulb packet. And don't even mention the bulbs I bought at the flower market in Amsterdam in Easter 2017. I heard later that anyone would be lucky to get any bulb to flower from what they sell there.

Anyway, last year, I thought I would try again. I heaved three bags of compost over the soil at the foot of the tree in front of the building - week by week (not all in one go) and then I put in some tulip and crocus bulbs with the result that there is now a line of purple across the soil. RESULT!!

Maybe my luck with bulbs will change. Let's see if the tulips will bloom. The leaves are already there.

It would be nice if other people did the same in their own street. More plants, more flowers, more bees, more honey! Flowers beat litter any day.

Subliminal attraction

I once read, many years ago, that if you were in a room with a whole load of people you didn't know at all, then you would nevertheless end up talking to people with whom you shared things in common. I've often found this to be the case.

Take yesterday, for instance. I wanted to try out a new singing class as I shall soon be teaching on Thursdays myself, which means I can no longer take lessons with Sylvia Dürnhöfer. Shame. So I went to try out a class with a teacher called Grant Sung (a student of conducting from Hong Kong).

I got there and the three rows of seats were already pretty full. I hung about waiting to ask the teacher if I could try the class out. No problem. Where to sit? There were some seats free in the front row so I sat next to a woman whose looks reminded me of me and my old school friend Karen.

Some time during the lesson, we had an exercise involving singing numbers going up and down in a particular pattern. I turned to the woman next to me and said, in German, "That's so difficult. I prefer words to numbers and English is my first language so it's even harder to sing numbers so fast in a foreign language."

She then told me that her first language was also English. It turns out that she comes from Birkenhead - not far from where I come from in Wales. She'd also studied German, and worked as an English Language Assistant Teacher, which is how we both came to live in Germany.

When I came back here again in 1999, I had intended to stay for three years then swan off to France. She intended staying here for one year and now that one year has turned into decades.

And like me, she ended up translating.

What are the chances that, given at least six seating options in a room full of strangers, I ended up sitting next to the person that most resembled me and who, like me, was just there to try the class out? Spooky.

There are 52 2-day holidays a year. Yipee!

Although the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey, as played by Maggie Smith, did not know what a weekend was, I think they are one of modern-day life's best inventions.

You just need to read some of the 19th-century novels about the industrial north by Dickens and Gaskell, for example, to realise that we've got it pretty good these days. The working day is legally down to about 8 hours a day and most people around the world get two days off every week; some only get 1 day a week off.

Just imagine! Two days off every week. Wonderful stuff. Yes, one might have to do some household chores, but you'd do that in normal holiday time, too.

I've just spent a wonderfully indulgent two days: hours of reading in the library on Saturday morning, my favourite Saturday lunch down in the Asian place, coffee with digestive biscuits (gluten-free, naturally) in the library, and a walk in stunningly beautiful countryside along the Düssel on Saturday afternoon. Then I find there is a new series of Shakespeare and Hathaway, which I can watch on dailymotion.com.

Sunday is equally good: the newspapers online, more episodes of Shakespeare and Hathaway, another performance of Kinky Boots at the cinema (with popcorn, of course), then off to the university library to get another book out and read some journals (including one on Sherlock Holmes), back home for tea and more S&H and then a new season of Endeavour on ITV.

And no need to work at all. Heaven. Praise be to the weekend.

Happiness is...

...when you don't have to change the seat setting on all the weight machines in the gym.

It's the little things in life that make it pleasant.

Gehweg - its purpose should be clear

One thing that tickles me about the German language is how much easier the words are to understand than in English. Okay, so they might, as Mark Twain once said, be so long that they seem to parade across the printed page. On the other hand, though, they are much more down-to-earth because, rather than being based on Latin or Greek, their roots are Germanic.

A simple example of this is the word 'eulogy' in English. What the hell is that? You can't guess from just looking at it. If you look up the etymology of the word (see the link in the dictionary folder to the right), you'll get this:

eulogy (n.)

mid-15c., from Latin eulogium, from Greek eulogia "praise; good or fine language" (in New Testament, "blessing"), from eu "well" (see eu-) + -logia "speaking" (see -logy). Eu legein meant "speak well of."

The German word? Lobrede = praise speech. Or if it's written down Lobschrift = praise writing. Simple. Right?

So how come so many Germans have difficulty in understanding the everyday word that is 'Gehweg'? It literally means 'walk way', i.e. pavement.

Time and again, I have to point out to adult cyclists that what I am walking on is a 'Gehweg' , i.e. a path for people who are walking, and that that bit in the middle of the quiet residential street where you might get one slow car every 10 minutes is what is called a 'street' (Straße). And that that is the bit they should be cycling on.

(Fortunately, I live in Germany so I have never been beaten up for daring to lecture them. Well, not yet.)

Personally, I think that adults that insist on cycling at any speed along any pavement - especially when there is little traffic on the road and often when there is even a nice, wide cycle lane on the street - should not be allowed out of the house without a carer.

If they are too obtuse to learn the difference between a 'Gehweg' (sideWALK as the Americans so clearly put it), a 'Radfahrweg' (bicycle path) and a 'Straße' (road or street) at their age, then they constitute a danger to the public and should, as I said, not be allowed out on the streets without supervision. It's not like the words are veiled in any kind of etymological mystery. 

I rest my case.

Kinky Boots - the definition of the word 'exuberence'

One change in modern life that I really enjoy is the fact that you can now toodle off to your local cinema and watch world-class performances from theatres in the UK, the MET Opera House in New York and the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. 

I've even seen the most recent Viking exhibition in the British Museum and spent three hours behind the scenes at the National Gallery, both in London, thanks to the silver screen.

At one point, I thought that cinemas would all close their doors as more and more people were staying at home, watching DVDs, streaming and using on-demand services online. And then someone came up with this brilliant idea and now cinemas have new audiences. 

Yesterday, I spent a very pleasant two and a quarter hours in Cinema, the cinema in Schneider-Wibbel-Gasse in the Altstadt. And it was pretty full, with people of all ages, from very giggly teenagers (parts of the show were very, very funny) to retired people. 

Kinky Boots, a modern musical, was a recording of the live performance at the Adelphi Theatre in London. Music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper. The singing was fantastic. The dances excellent. At the end, the audience were bopping along in their seats. The two main characters - Charlie and Lola - were simply perfect. The entire cast got a standing ovation.

Highly enjoyable. So much so, I will probably go and see it again on Sunday. What a great use of the cinema, which is now no longer just for blockbuster films.

Here's a brief video of the Adelphi Theatre trailer.

Want to learn English? Go to the coffee shop.

Yesterday, I walked home from teaching my Monday exam preparation course and, as usual, I passed through the main station. 

I noticed that Tchibo, an outlet that sells coffee (and now a lot more), had new non-food goods in, so I walked in to see what diverse objects they were touting this week.

What pleasantly surprised me was the way the goods were labelled. On the boxes, the package band and tags, not only was the German word for the item mentioned, but also the English word underneath it.

Words like 'socks' and 'pyjamas' were easy, but yesterday, you could have learnt the words for 'organiser boxes' and 'roasting tin'.

So...if you've got time on your hands while waiting for a train, pop into Tchibo and give yourself a quick vocabulary test. 

Practice makes perfect.

English - a very foreign language indeed

I've just seen this article in The Guardian newspaper today: Police called in after poster tells residents of flats to speak English

I quote from the article:

"A poster telling residents of a block of flats “we do not tolerate” people speaking languages other than English in the building has been reported to police...

Addressing Winchester Tower residents, it said the “Queens (sic) English is the spoken tongue here” and suggests that people wanting to speak a language other than English should leave the country."

It is so ironic when you think of the fact that English is a mongrel language, a mix of many different languages.

As an article written by, amongst others, David Crystal on the Britannica website points out:

"Words from more than 350 languages have entered English in this way. Like French, Spanish, and Russian, English frequently forms scientific terms from Classical Greek word elements. Although a Germanic language in its sounds and grammar, the bulk of English vocabulary is in fact Romance or Classical in origin."

Before the Anglo-Saxons came along to Britain from the 5th century onwards, the island contained Picts (Celtic-speaking people), Celts such as the Welsh and even the Romans had lived on the island for a few centuries (an island so horrible for the Romans that to be posted there as a soldier was considered a punishment). 

After the Anglo-Saxons - from Germany - invaded, it was the turn of the Vikings and then the Normans (also originally Vikings [Norsemen] who had previously settled in northern France - Normandy). 

Later, the British - mostly English - went off to see what it could pillage from other nations and brought back even more foreign words.

This means that, now, lots of the basic words in English are German in origin. Here are some German words: Hand, Finger, Arm, Sand, Wind. Can you guess what they mean? With a slightly different spelling to the English you have words like Mann, Glas and Hund (hound). And here are some other words you'll understand if you pronounce them: Haus, Laus, Maus, and Stuhl.

Thanks to the Vikings, we got, among many other words, 'sky', 'them', 'their' and my favourite 'window' (from 'vindauga' = wind's eye).

Then came the civilised French and gave us all the more educated words, like 'educated', most of which originated from Latin. Even something as English as the word 'toast' comes from Latin via French. The 'beef' you might have for your Sunday roast lunch? A word from French. As are 'veal', 'pork' and 'mutton'.

Later we got things like 'ketchup'. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines its origins: "late 17th century: apparently from Chinese (Hokkien dialect) kê-chiap ‘brine of pickled fish or shellfish’, perhaps partly via Malay kecap, kicap ‘soy sauce’."

And 'punch' -  a word from Sanskrit (pañc), meaning “five.” The drink was originally made with five ingredients: alcohol, sugar, lemon, water, and tea or spices. The word 'punch' was was first recorded in British documents in 1632.

The 'tomato' you have with your English fry-up? OED: "early 17th century: from French, Spanish, or Portuguese tomate, from Nahuatl tomatl "

So when someone lays down the rules and says that one should not speak any foreign language in the UK, it just makes me laugh and shake my head in incredulity. 

English is the most foreign language of all.

February - the right time for the coronavirus

It's the first Saturday of a new month - which means I get to do the Tales for Tots for the under threes at the English library. This time round, I had a helper for two of the four stories: Günther, a recently retired English teacher, who now helps run the library as a volunteer. From what he said last time round, I knew he was dying to read a story or two and though he did protest a few times, I could tell he was willing. 

Well, he loved it. He had a cluster of little girls sitting in front of him with their noses practically in the book and squealing and pointing to things in the pictures. 

Anyway, it suddenly occurred to me later on in the day, that I had no idea why February was called February. I know about Janus, the two-faced god portrayed above the entrance to the home, one facing out, one facing in. But February?

Well, it seems it might well be the right month to fight infections as the month was named after Februa or Februatio, which was a Roman festival that took place on the 13th to 15th days of the month. During this time, ritual purification took place. So it was a time of cleaning, washing and purging. 

And as Wikipedia points out: "Some sources connect the Latin word for fever (febris) with the same idea of purification or purging, due to the sweating commonly seen in association with fevers."

So let's hope that February helps all febrile people.