Last week on the radio I listened to a report that was really more of a sad fable, entitled “The Last Cow” about a village in the Swabian region and the decision of the last rancher there to ironically buy the farm and retire with no heirs to take over the family business, purportedly run since Roman times. The German title for the report (Der Letztes Kรผh) sounded like “the last coup” but the German word for coup d'etat or blow is the funner word Putsch.
Monday, 30 December 2013
landschaft
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, environment, labour, language, lifestyle
Saturday, 14 December 2013
chuchotage or gesticulation
Often, when available, I switch on the closed-captions while, watching movies in German because sometimes the being able to read the words as well make it easier to understand above accents and fast speech—and the text-version of the dialogue is sometimes simplified and leaves out slang and Englisch terminology. Also, when watching the nightly news, viewers respect the tolling bells that proceed the nationally syndicated programme like BBC watchers not daring to interrupt the pips that usher in the top of the hour, though all broadcasts are moderated by the same anchors, I like to watch the public stations that feature a sign-language interpreter—just to see how animated they are, when to my perspective they're just miming the news but trust that they are conveying volumes.
Friday, 26 July 2013
cognation or parts-of-speech
A discussion with a linguist on the radio about the tendency not just for minority and endangered languages and dialects not only to cannibalise terminology from overpowering and domineering tongues with a colonial-metropolitan status, incorporating more and more elements of English (the lingua franca), but also of the cannibalism of so-called killer languages.
Sunday, 10 February 2013
fauxcabulary
Intuniv (Adjective.) Someone who easily grasps situations. “Joan was very intuniv and immediately sensed that her blind date was a repellent troll.”
catagories: ⚕️, language, networking and blogging
Thursday, 24 January 2013
fig leaf or bootsy collins
This day marks the anniversary of the assassination of the Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus by a cohort commander and a group of dissatisfied members of the royal guard. The emperor was is more commonly known as Caligula, a nickname earned in his childhood while accompanying his father on field marches, scurrying to keep pace with the adults in his little boots. I am sure that was only earned posthumously. His removal from power makes the first known occasion in the history of the Empire that an emperor was removed from office by a grand collusion of the military and the Senate, and not the usual intrigue over succession by their own relatives.
Sunday, 16 December 2012
magnificat or o du frรถhlich
This seems like a very nice and collected way to approach the holidays and properly wind down from all the jingle-pressure, and although the 21. December has garnered an awful reputation—though only, I think, for this year and not for very much longer, I do appreciate the fact that the chant or that night is O Oriens—o breaking of the day, splendor of the light eternal. Though we should fear not, we ought not, I think, to stammer along without any take-away. It is not necessarily something dodged or a saving grace, to reboot from dreary pessimism, but could still be an antiphon that days, no matter how limitless or numbered, are gifts and should not be taken for granted.
Monday, 10 December 2012
as plain as or party on the patio
Friday, 23 November 2012
leftovers or turkey in the straw
Thursday, 22 November 2012
the abiding place or ััะตะดะธะทะต́ะผัะต
Friday, 16 November 2012
narrhalla u. prunksitz
I have experienced and even participated in quite a few Karnival or Faschings events over the years, dressing up and watching the parades in Wรผrzburg and Kรถln. Rhenish traditions in western and northern Germany are distinct from the tenor and scope of the celebrations in Frankish Swabia and Bavaria but the party and pageantry are executed in the same spirit.
catagories: ๐ฆ๐น, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฅ, holidays and observances, language, revolution
Thursday, 15 November 2012
ancien of days
French flea markets (car-boot sales, marchรฉ aux puces) have definitely been something to see for the local provenance and assizes.
Tuesday, 13 November 2012
infinitive and aorist
Saturday, 10 November 2012
(ad)mirality or pรซrkthyes
Philology and the classifications of grammar were naturally invented long after languages developed and drifted apart and are imperfect disciplines trying to fit foreign tongues to a framework of rules whose theory and practice maybe go unnoticed to native speakers. Constantly struggling to translate and parsing my own words, I think I have gained an appreciation for mood and tense and try not to take such parts of speech for granted.
English has managed to shed the need for most conjugation and only has a limited spectrum of grammatical cases, exclusively constructed by other means than declension, while many others rely on a linguistic quadriga of the not unfamiliar nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases to express ownership, location, motion, agency and action.
Thursday, 1 November 2012
holiday cavalcade: memento mori and yakety sax

Sunday, 28 October 2012
in season: butternut-salmon lasagna
For this dish to serve 3 to 4, one will need:
- A medium casserole dish
- A large Butternut squash, enough to get 1½ pounds from (600 – 750 grams), minus the skin and seeds (a slender squash, as compared to a dumpy one with wider squash hips tends to have less seeds)
- A bit of butter, flour (about 4 tablespoons each) and salt and pepper and fresh dill (chopped) and nutmeg (Muskat) for seasoning
- 1 cup (250 ml) of cream
- 2 cups (500 ml) of vegetable stock or bullion
- A 9 oz (250 g) package of smoked salmon (fresh or from the refrigerated section)
- About 7 oz (200 g) of grated cheese (gouda or mozzarella)
- A 4 oz (about 100 g) package of lasagna pasta
- A large onion
Begin by shelling the squash and removing the seeds, and then slice the squash into small cubes and set aside.
Pre-heat the oven to 400° F (200°C). Peel and dice up the onion, frying it in a large pan until glassy in some butter over medium heat. Add a few pinches of flour to the pan (about a tablespoon in all) then pour in the broth and the cream, reducing the heat, and add the graded cheese, seasonings and garnish with the bundle of dill. Mix and leave on low heat for around five minutes. Take the uncooked lasagna noodles and arrange in layers in a casserole dish (grease with a bit of butter) apportioning slices of the salmon, squash and a dousing of the sauce, three layers deep. Pour the remaining sauce over the top, spinkling a bit more cheese over it, and allow to bake for about 45 minutes. Enjoy with a fine Moscato white wine.
Saturday, 27 October 2012
in sextus novembris
Reflecting on the upcoming and rather secularized celebrations of Guy Fawkes Night,
commemorating the foiled Gunpowder Plot of the Fifth of November where the
triggerman Guy Fawkes is burned in effigy, it is curious how in some four
centuries of historical memory documenting revelry, sentiment and celebration,
we witness perhaps the process of transposition and myth-making. The many hypotheses regarding Christianity
supplanting pagan feasts with their own holidays in order to ease the
tradition, like All Saints’ Day and Halloween for Nordic and Celtic Samhain or
Christmas for Roman Saturnalia, cannot be tested and accounts are only implicit
and worked backwards.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, holidays and observances, language, revolution
Wednesday, 24 October 2012
consider yourself part of the furniture
Before living in Germany, I had never heard the word Stammtisch, although the phenomenon and culture of a table for regulars, a salon-society, and a designated meeting point, a reserved spot, for networking and politicking, like the word, had been long since an established fixture of many societies. That term sounded very formal, like holding court, and maybe that made me seek out a less down-to-earth translation or equivalent. It comes under other names, too, of course, including the cracker-barrel or Coffee-Klatch, which surely has German origins too, and all the different words with differing connotations of hierarchical sophistication. Cafes, guesthouses, inns (Gaststรคtte) and pubs usually distinguished the gathering point for their regulars with a special ceremonial ashtray or a table flag (Wimpel). Mostly the get-together has been sublimated in the form of a virtual presence, but in some places the tradition continues unbroken.
Saturday, 13 October 2012
verรฐlaun, iad duais, the prize, o prรฉmio, el premio, el premi, ar priz, le prix, de prijs, den prรคis, der prisen, premija, den prisen, i priset, palkinto, auhind, der preis, il premio, prรฆmium, il premju, lu premiu, w nagroda, a dรญj, cena, รงmimi, premiul, ฯฮฑ ฮฒฯฮฑฮฒฮตฮฏฮฑ, ะฟััะผัั
It is a great honour to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, along with 502 million fellow Europeans, and I believe in the congratulatory and admonishing spirit of the committee’s unanimous decision. Individuals surely take on the burden and potential of promoting harmony, too, and there are worthy and magnanimous individuals out there working in the public and struggling in the shadows to those ends, but awards en masse, neither slights for the other nominees nor anodyne and over-cautious, are not without precedent, like when the prize was given to Doctors without Borders (Mรฉdecins sans Frontiรจrs, รrzte ohne Grenzen) or Great Britain conferring the George Cross collectively to the people of Malta for gallantry during World War II.
catagories: ๐ช๐บ, foreign policy, language
Friday, 12 October 2012
t9 or sui generis
Although not quite in contention as laureate material for its sometimes frustrating poetry, the chain of developments—from Pennsylvania 6-5000 to telephony for the hearing impaired to text-messaging—that led to predictive text, T9 technology, I think, deserves acknowledgement.
At first, I didn’t care to have my lines stepped on or my sentences completed when tapping out a little telegram, plus the fact that nimbleness of digits come with practice on any keyboard, but once I got more accustomed to the interface and being able to switch languages, I started to enjoy it, even appreciate it. Another interesting aspect is the strange word puzzles, poems by substitution that come out of the sequence of numbers, at first as broad suggestions and then narrowed down, like from gone, hone, home, hoof, goof, hood, to good. This transforming vocabulary do not quite make anagrams (Anagramme) but have a similar feel and I think the hidden relationships of neighbouring words that pop up are surprising and probably reveals something about the spacing and arrangement of the alphabet and the dimensions of language, as both disambiguations adapt.
catagories: language, technology and innovation
Wednesday, 10 October 2012
swimlanes


catagories: ๐ญ, America, graphic design, language, technology and innovation