I did them all but have no recollection of (b). I’m pretty sure I ordered the right thing (a), since I was very excited that the pastry shop had something labelled “Berliners” so I didn’t have to use too much of my rusty German. But maybe they had a special jelly-free version, or maybe I pointed to the wrong thing…?
Majormd, is this current US Forces policy to have that half-day crash course on German culture, etc? I ask, because, when I was stationed there in 1972, I never got anything resembling a course in German culture. They just threw us out onto the economy. The night I arrived, I wandered into downtown Wiesbaden and ordered from a restaurant. Of course, I had had a year of German in high school, some two years before.
I just now saw that I messed up in describing the “Head Start” class - it was actually a ½ day class x 2 weeks, not a single half-day class. We learned how to order food & beer, how to use trains, planes, hotels, busses, subways, & not offend our German acquaintances by saying “Guten Nacht” without the gutteral sound (IIRC without the gutteral, “nacht” means naked, but my faith in what I learned in these classes has been strained by recent revelations)
These classes were absolutely, no exceptions mandatory for all soldiers to complete within 3 weeks of arrival, unless, of course, your unit was destined to go to Graf/Hohenfels, in which you went to Head Start whenever…
Hurry up & wait at it’s finest. Ahhh, the memories
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Sue, it seems they do teach a lot of nonsense in those “Head Start” classes. While ‘Nacht’ (night) may sound like ‘nackt’ (naked) if you get the guttural wrong, ‘gute nackt’ (good naked?!) makes no sense at all and there’s no risk of misunderstanding or offense. Who are the people that teach those classes, anyway?
Reverse example: A German word for ‘get’ is ‘bekommen’, which is often wrongly translated by Germans as ‘become’. Thus, in English classes at school we were warned (in jest!) not to enter a restaurant and say, “May I become a steak?”, lest our wish be fulfilled too literally. Now, a waiter may be puzzled or amused by such a malaprop, but has any tourist ever been butchered because of that? I don’t think so…
There is a science-fiction story (the author of which I can’t remember) in which Richard Nixon makes a deal with the devil to win the Presidency, and as a result, when JFK makes the aforementioned speech, he turns into a jelly doughnut right there at the podium.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
Sue, I’m not very familiar with Franconian dialect, but my guess from standard German would be that they mean “seltsam” (strange, odd, queer, funny).
However, the German word for “seldom” (“selten”) can also mean “unusual” in certain contexts, e.g. “eine selten dämliche Idee” (an uncommonly dumb idea). Maybe some dialects have extented “selten” to actually mean the same as “seltsam” (they certainly share some lingistic root anyway), and when people translate the word into English, they are not aware on the narrower meaning of the English word. But that’s just speculation.
