This is where I'm at, again

I started this blog in 2012 when I had an inkling that my time in Germany was drawing to a close—partly as a record of all the things I found either delightful or maddening (or both!) and partly, maybe, to process how I felt about leaving after three years of pretty high highs and relatively low lows.

Now, eight years later, I'm at the point where, barring any change in circumstances, my departure from Germany is once again reasonably foreseeable. And, once again, I suddenly feel like I have a lot to say about this place where I've now spent almost half of my adult life.

But enough of the feelings and on to the lolz, amirite?

Germans have a reputation as a very literal people. Although they've produced famed poets (Brecht! Goethe! So I've heard, at least!) who could wield metaphors and other figurative language with the best of them, on the whole I have found this to be true. Don't pose a rhetorical question to a German unless you want it answered. Sometimes this is infuriating! And other times, well...

I was at the library, in the Before Time, when I came across the German DVD of Life of Pi. In English, it's an enigmatic title. It plays its cards close to the vest. It's also a title that is extraordinarily easy to translate into German. Leben von Pi. Boom. That'll be five bucks because I'm a professional translator now. But instead, they went with...

... Schiffbruch mit Tiger. That's Shipwreck with Tiger, for all you non-German-speakers out there. And just like that, the mystery is gone. The bubble has burst. Thanks, Germany.

1776: The Explanation of Independence

Germans, operating with a somewhat more limited vocabulary than English speakers,* sometimes have to make do with one word where English speakers would prefer to use two or more to better differentiate between nuanced concepts. Sometimes this difference is fairly minor and maybe slightly comical. For example, where English has tennis rackets, ping-pong paddles, and baseball bats, German has Tennisschläger (tennis-hitters), Pingpongschläger (ping-pong-hitters), and Baseballschläger (baseball-hitters). Now, you could argue that there is a subtle difference between a racket, a paddle, and a bat, but at the end of the day they're all for hitting things. Point goes to Germany.

Other times, it seems like two words might have been a good idea. For example, the German word Erklärung, which means both explanation and declaration. When you go through German customs, you're asked to fill out a Zollerklärung: a customs declaration, or should I say a customs explanation. Fine - customs are a pretty dry subject; nothing to get excited about.

But what about this: "He chased her through the airport, scattering passengers and their suitcases in his wake. Catching her just before she boarded the plane, he took her trembling hand in his, got down on one knee, and explained his love."

Yup, in German, a declaration of love is a Liebeserklärung - an explanation of love. And while I'm sure if you grew up German, a Liebeserklärung is every bit as exciting (or horrifying, as the case may be) as a declaration of love, the word itself seems strangely dispassionate. A declaration of love is romantic and reckless, while an explanation of love seems like it would be accompanied by a lot of graphs and stats.

Oh yeah, she's feelin' it.

* Exact numbers are hard to come by (the prevalence of compound words in German makes it difficult to get a precise count of how many German words there are, plus half of English words are just straight-up stolen from other languages), but the general consensus is that English has a significantly larger vocabulary than German.

Another pig-cool blog post

Pork and potatoes are the twin mainstays of German cuisine, but pigs, at least, seem to have infiltrated the German language as well. In addition to the aforementioned saugeil (pig-horny, aka cool), Germans can describe winters as saukalt (pig-cold)*, concert tickets as sauteuer (pig-expensive), and people they don't like as saudumm (pig-stupid). This doesn't make sense, of course - are pigs cold? Are they horny? They're definitely not stupid - but logic hasn't played a role in the development of most languages, and German is no exception.

And just in case you needed any more proof, please refer to the German dubbing of Die Hard, in which German John McClane utters the immortal line, "Yippee-ki-yay, du Schweinebacke!" (Yippee-ki-yay, you pig cheek!). QED. Game, set, match. Checkmate.

As a bonus, please enjoy this picture of me looking worried about dinner (and the prevalence of pig imagery in the German language).

*if it's a long winter and you need to switch it up, you can also say arschkalt (ass-cold).

P.S. My go-to online dictionary suggests "colder than a brass toilet seat in the Yukon" as the best/only translation for saukalt, so apparently Germans aren't the only ones with colourful cold imagery.