Online shopping sucks...

 ...as the Americans would say.

It's an ugly phrase - to say that something 'sucks' - but there is no other way to put it.

A few weeks ago, I took off my watch while exercising and I've not been able to find it. And, believe me, I've looked everywhere.

Last week, therefore, I decided to buy a new one and went onto the site of the company that has been called "the evil empire", i.e. Amazon. I trawled through ladies watches with a leather strap as I was worried that a metal strap might be too large for me and, since we can't enter shops, I wouldn't be able to have it adjusted and it would fall off and I'd be back to square one, i.e. watchless.

The new watch arrived on Saturday and when I took it out of its box, I was shocked. My mouth fell open. It was so small and the strap so thin. Now that it's on my wrist, it looks utterly ludicrous: way too small for my arm. It might be all right for a small 12-year-old girl, but not for a grown woman. 

If only I could have seen it in real life. I would never have chosen it, but now I'm stuck with it. Online shopping sucks.

May - the loveliest month?

 On my early morning walks every day, I am able to marvel at all the lovely flowers currently in bloom. I think that May has the most different kinds of flower in one go.

The glory of the following are fading fast:

- honeysuckle (Geißblatt)
- forget-me-nots (Vergissmeinnicht)
- lilac (Flieder - even though there are white lilac trees, too)

The following can still be enjoyed in their full glory:

- bluebells (Hasenglöckchen). Currently there are large clumps and even swathes of them giving off their heady scent. And they are not only blue but also a delicate pink and white colour.
- rhododendrons
- azaleas
- hawthorn (Hagedorn). Probably my very favourite blossom - so small, so delicate, so ephemeral.
- irises (Schwertlilie). Most of them haven't yet opened up yet, but they are there.
- wisteria (Glyzine or Blauregen)
- dogwood (Hartriegel or Hornstrauch). This is a tree that has large, white flat flowers - four petals with a dark dot in the centre of the flower. Stunning and uplifting
- horse chesstnuts (Roßkastanie) - magnificent trees - this town has an abundance of old horse chestnuts, sadly under threat from the drought of the last four years
- buttercups (butterblume) - so pretty
- the humble daisy (Gänseblümchen). I have watched lots of people take photos of each other standing in front of large swathes of these small but cheerful flowers in the park.

Why not go for a stroll round your neighbourhood and see which of these flowers you can find?

Never a truer word..

I walked through the Altstadt on my early morning walk last Sunday and did some window shopping in a small shop there that sells, shall we say, quirky home accessories.

One of the signs in the window said this: Erstaunlich, dass Leute mit wenig Ahnung viel Meinung haben.

Or in English:  [It's] Astounding that people with little idea have a lot of opinion.

This puts me in mind of the Dunning-Kruger Effect that David G. reminded me of recently. This says that people with low ability for a task overestimate their ability. (You can look this up on Wikipedia.)

And a week or so ago, I heard this quote on a YouTube ad: "One of the great challenges in life is knowing enough to think you're right but not enough to know you're wrong."

Yet another quote from YouTube, which is all over the web, too:  "In the age of information, ignorance is a choice." 

All these things are going through my mind because certain people in my life - three generations of them - have demonstrated very clearly  their lack of reading  and reasoning skills and yet are blaming me for their lack of understanding. Two of these people left school as soon as they could - which meant that they didn't even attempt one exam at the age of 16. The other was forced to stay at school until the age of 18 - because that is the law in the UK these days. But they all blamed me for any miscomprehension and not their lack of reading comprehension skills. 

They put me in mind of a lot of Daily Mail readers. When, for example, a recent article pointed out that continental Europe was suffering from drought and had done so for the last few years, a whole load of Daily Mail readers claimed that that was because there were too many people (i.e. Germany had let in too many asylum seekers and refugees) and too much industry and agriculture.

And I wondered if that was the problem with drought regions around the world, like the Sahara - too many people, too much industry and overfarming - rather than the correct definition of the word "drought", which is too little precipitation (rainfall or snowfall) in a given period of time.

As the saying goes, in an age of information, ignorance is a choice. 

I despair sometimes. The fact that people cannot use the Internet to check facts and definitions and to learn about the world around them in general just leaves me - to use another vulgar phrase - gobsmacked. 

Urlaubsreif

The German word "urlaubsreif" consists of the word "Urlaub" (holiday) and "reif" (ripe). I am "holiday ripe" or ready for a holiday. Or to put it more vulgarly, I'm "gagging for a holiday". 

And I am not only "holiday ripe", I am also "ripe for the island" or "reif für die Insel". I feel the need to be a bit like Robinson Crusoe: I need a break from everyday life. 

The problem with working from home is this: when you are here, you think, "Well, I might as well work. What else can I do?" Especially when you get e-mails asking if you can squeeze a text in anyway. You sit down for a short while to translate a text and before you know it, you've spent hours surfing the newspapers or - as modern parlance has it - doomscrolling.

In these strange times of coronavirus, no-one has been going anywhere much. And even 'staycations' are not alluring. Everything is shut right now. What are you going to do but work? 

I totted up the number of days I've had off  work since October 2019 and it comes to 12: one week in a spa town  up north in July, a week in another spa town down south in October, 1 day in a hotel in D'dorf just to see some different walls (all between lockdowns) and one day off last week - for a colonoscopy. Does that count as a day off? I'm still wondering.

All I know is that visions of previous holidays keep flashing into my mind while working, like some siren call. Will I ever even get to see the hills and forests of Wuppertal and Solingen again - never mind my beloved bay on Mallorca? The vaccination campaign seems to give us hope that some loosening of the rules might be possible by the end of summer. I hope so. Otherwise I'm going to go stir-crazy or, in other words, suffer from cabin fever.

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.