Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Ich möchte gern Jazzmusik.
Not my German teacher.
With regard to Karen & me: lots of big things bind us together, but lots of little things do, too. For example, the fact we both suffered through two quarters of German at Berkeley.
The College of Chemistry required us to learn things like Ich möchte gern Jazzmusik and Bringen Sie mir bitte Rotkohl dazu! I’ll never understand how red cabbage related to Germany’s domination of the 19th and early 20th Century organic chemistry literature; but in the minds of our profs, two quarters of German girded us for the Beilstein Handbuch, Zeitschriften, and Naturwissenschaften.
Yeah, I pulled those names outa my ass. Or outa my deepest darkest memory, which is much the same place.
I haven’t retained a hell of a lot of German — little more than a handful of inane lines. One (the title of this post) burst forth this evening when some silly commercial came on TV. Another tends to erupt at the most inopportune of moments.
Mid-sex, for example:
Das macht Grossmutter besonders freude!
I suppose That makes Grandmother especially happy beats screaming out the name of an old boyfriend or girlfriend, but it’s a buzz kill just the same.
What a weird, warped textbook. The one chapter Karen and I talk about more than any other concerned the Gastarbeiter, the guestworkers brought in from Southern and Eastern European countries to fuel Germany’s burgeoning industrial sector. This chapter fairly dripped with racism, and included the memorable line*
Die Gastarbeiter haben vielen Krankheiten.
The guestworkers have many illnesses.
Many illnesses, dirty, uneducated, don’t blend in well with others — it appalled us, reading crap like this here in the bastion of Liberal America. The book was written by the Departmental Chair, a guy we never saw nor heard from. I wonder how many years they used that textbook before someone squawked?
I like the fact that Karen and I have 25 years of common memories. I like the fact I can blurt Ich möchte gern Jazzmusik and the woman doesn’t look at me like I’m a freak.
No, that’s my son’s job.
D.
*My memory is not necessarily grammatically accurate.
I slipped into German for my review of “North & South” the other day, but that’s because I have this set of rabid Richard Armitage fans who stop by from a German fan loop whenever anyone in the world mentions his name. But the German isn’t mine. I farmed it out 🙂
Ich habe une schmertz!
schmertz, shmertz, schmertz. i like that word.
the only german i’ve picked up is from singing–that first line i learned in chorus this year; we did Brahms’ Eine Deutsche (sp?) Requiem and out prof decided we HAD to know what everything meant, at least a little. shmertz=pain. yay. i also had to sing in german for my voice lessons for the past three years, but i dont remember much of that.
german is funny.
there was a night monitor person at my dorm who would converse in german with a girl from the third floor. it made me happy.
Schmerz, no t. I just looked it up. I was pretty sure of the meaning, since Mittelshmerz (IIRC) = the pain of ovulation, but I had to be sure. Anyway, German is just Yiddish without the Hebrew influence. And they pronounce things funny, those Germans 🙂
Carrie, on my way to check it out!
Y’all have to check this out:
A Night at the Creation Museum
Who let the Jew into the Creation Museum?Â