Humour from immigrants in Germany

 I came across this during work today. It's a video made by the children of immigrants to Germany. The humour is very much along the line of the wonderful comedy series "Goodness Gracious Me" on BBC Radio 4 with a bunch of Indian comedians. Basically, they took the  kind of comments that Indians in the UK heard and turned them round. 

The same thing happens in this video. I particularly like the simple sketch of people trying to pronounce the name Sven as though it's something very hard and exotic. My father goes by the name of Gwyn. My German family thinks it is too hard to pronounce so they use his first name, Ernest. Only they use the German version "Ernst". I find it hard to believe that a German can't pronounce 'Gwyn'. I should pronounce their names using English pronunciation rules and see how they like that.

Anyway, here's a laugh for you:

Wenn Migranten-Kids das sagen was Deutsche Sagen | Datteltäter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVPGUOOPBwM

Rude German joke

I walk around town, which means I get to see a lot of graffiti.

Someone has written this near my gym:

"Ich bin kein Fan von Hochzeiten - aber ich mag Scheiden."

You'll have to learn German to appreciate that. The pun doesn't work in English.

Was für einen Heckmeck!

What a palaver! What a fuss! All this debate about how to express the male and female forms of words. A debate that is getting worse and worse by the week. And it's causing ugly things to be happening in print and even when being read out.

What am I on about? In English, we say, "The students are in the room." Now, I'm all for being treated just as well as men, but this can make for some clumsiness in expression. The Germans have to write this: "Die Studenten[male form] und Studentinnen [the female form] sind in dem Zimmer." To cut this down in print, they have now started to write it like this instead: "Die Student*innen sind in dem Zimmer." And, so I have read, they now try to make that gap audible when reading out such texts.

English used to have a whole load of words that were different for male and female, such as the following:

manager - manageress   -    now plain "manager" for both men and women
headmaster - headmistress - now just "head teacher" or just "head"
chairman - chairwoman - now often just "the chair" or "chairperson"
poet - poetess - now just "poet"
steward - stewardess - now "flight attendant"

There are words for people in German that have only one form, such as

der Mensch - the person - why not der Mensch, die Menschin?
die Person - the person - why not der Person - die Personin?
das Kind - the child - why not der Kind, die Kindin?
die Wache - the sentry (even though they're normally men). Why not der Wache, die Wachin?
die Waise - the orphan - why not der Waise, die Waisin?
das Genie- the genius. It's neutral - 'das'. 

Maybe that is the way forward in Germany. Make all nouns referring to jobs and people neutral: das. 

In English, you can refer to a male student or a female student as just 'student'. Why can't German do the same? If you can refer to a baby as "das Baby", when it could be male or female, or to a child as "das Kind" when it could be male or female, why not just say "das Student", "das Bäcker" [baker] and "das Lehrer" [teacher] and have done with the entire argument?

When I say to people that I am a translator, they don't say, "Oh, you mean translatoress, don't you?" They can see or hear that I am female. Or at least work that out from my name. 

I am going to try and start a trend in Germany: in future, whenever anyone asks me what I do, I shall say, "Ich bin Übersetzer"*. And then wait for their reaction. And when they try to correct me, I'll ask if they need the suffix '-in' to figure out that I'm female.

*Normally, though, whenever anyone asks me what I do for a living, I normally say that I translate. I don't like to describe myself in one word such as "translator" because I do and am so much more than one word.

Amount of people??

 You mean...like this?

Another mistake that I hear native speakers of English make on the radio and TV is this: amount of people. 

"Amount" is a word that is used with things you can't count, such as 'rice'. You don't go into a Chinese restaurant and say, "I'd like the sweet and sour pork with 1,299 rices." Rice has no plural. Neither does furniture or money. Or a wealth of other uncountable nouns such as sand, knowledge, information, accommodation (whatever the Americans say), motivation and courage. (If you want more information on uncountable nouns, go here: https://ieltsliz.com/uncountable-nouns-word-list/).

If you can't count it, can't make a noun plural out of it, then you use all the words that go with uncountable nouns such as much, less and amount.

People, on the other hand, are countable. One person, two people. You'd ask, "How many people came to your birthday party?" and not, "How much people came?" If you can get that right, then how can you possibly use 'amount' and not 'number' when talking about people?

A large number of people ate a large amount of rice.
How many people ate how much rice?

Every time I hear the phrase "a large amount of people", I see a whole mountain of people all piled higgledy-piggledy on each other - just like a mound of rice in a bowl.

That's an "amount of people". Get it right, for heaven's sake. If you can't get simple English grammar right, what else can't you get right? Facts?

Jessica Fletcher - fashion icon?

As I may have already mentioned, I've been watching an awful lot of TV in my attempt to finish cross-stitching a tablecloth* as a gift for a former student of mine who makes wonderful things for me. And my TV viewing has included an awful lot of back-to-back episodes of Murder She Wrote, starring the delightful Angela Lansbury as former high-school English teacher-turned-crime writer Jessica Fletcher, or JB Fletcher as she often calls herself.

The series ran from 1984, when Ms Lansbury was just under 60 years of age, until 1996. The more I watch it, the more I admire it. With all such crime series in which each episode stands alone, I am in awe of the writers who can create such perfect little stories that last a mere forty-five minutes, as well as the casting agents who hire the actors with the perfect faces to fit each role. 

With Murder She Wrote, though, there is another set of workers that I admire: the people who dress the character of Jessica Fletcher. In each episode, she appears in several outfits, nearly all of which are very well put together. Her clothes and accessories set off her face and figure to their best advantage. Classic combinations. Beautifully tailored. Wonderfully accented. I am in often awe and want to rush out and try out such outfits myself. 

This website will give you a small idea of what I mean. I don't think that this person has picked out the best of her outfits all the time, but some of them will exemplify my claim that Jessica Fletcher is most definitely a fashion icon:

https://fashionshewore.tumblr.com/

* The tablecloth was finally completed at 6.10 p.m. on 14 April. I finally get my life back. Nearly everything else bar working and sleeping was on hold.

Living vicariously

 That's what I've been doing a lot of recently: vicarious living.

I remember coming across that word in the English lessons of Miss Olive Jewitt when I was in my mid-teens. At first, I thought it had something to do with vicars. How wrong I was.

Last week, until things got busy on Friday, I had finished my work by mid-morning, which meant I could devote all my free hours to working on the cross-stitch tablecloth for a friend of mine. A never-ending saga. 

In order to entertain myself, I watched an awful lot of TV again, including some on a channel that is new to me: Smithsonian Channel. Back-to-back documentaries such as Aerial America (1 hour of aerial shots of one state with lots of background details), Aerial Greece (shots of Greece from the air with lots of explanations), three back-to-back documentaries on sharks...you get the picture. Later on in the afternoon, I switch to 5USA and it's one episode after another of Law & Order followed by about 3 hours of NCIS. And on Saturday, as of 2 p.m., it's non-stop Murder She Wrote; Sunday afternoon is time for Columbo.

I am currently living life through these programmes. I get to see the outside world from the air and in the sea. I see parties, travel on planes, go to restaurants, go to conferences etc. through the eyes of Jessica Fletcher and Lieutenant Columbo, Lennie Briscoe and Jack McCoy, as well as Jethro Gibbs, Ziva David and Tim McGee. Just to mention a few of the names whose voices and faces I am most familiar with these days because that's how small my world has become.

The word "vicarious" is defined as "experienced in the imagination through the feelings and actions of another person". It's what I have always done with books and now, thanks to this bloody tablecloth, it's what I'm doing with all these documentaries and crime shows. My life is currently being lived through them.

I want my old life back! I want to have my own experiences again!!!

April, April, der macht was er will.

At the beginning of last week, although the temperature was supposed to be a mere 8 degrees Celsius above freezing point, I was nevertheless able to sun myself on my balcony as of 8 o'clock in the morning. My balcony is a veritable sun trap in the morning and I need to tank up on vitamin D as I am still way below the minimum threshold.

Then we had the Easter weekend and what usually happens on a public holiday happened on all four days of the extended weekend: the temperatures plummeted and the weather became overcast.

Yesterday, Easter Monday, was a superb example of public holiday weather: we started off with merely overcast skies and progressed throughout the day from light rain to snow to hailstones to bright sunshine with blue skies and back again to snow and hailstones.

I always feel sorry for schoolchildren when the weather turns like this. On a day when they can go out and enjoy the countryside and parks with their parents, they have to remain cooped up at home.

April, April, der macht was er will is a German country saying and translates literally as "April, April, it does what it wants". 

"April, April", however, is also what a German prankster shouts triumphantly when someone has fallen for their April Fool's joke. The English equivalent would simply be "April Fool!"

I feel, therefore, that the weather was playing a very late April Fool's joke on us yesterday by keeping us guessing what would come next. When the sun came out in the afternoon, I'm sure a lot of people though that the worst was over and they went out to enjoy the sunshine. More fool them.