Thereby showing that the phenomenon that gave use gems like “PIN number” and “ATM machine” (also known as the self-demonstrating RAS syndrome, i.e. “redundant acronym syndrome syndrome”) is actually age-old :).
I have a friend who is fluent in French, Spanish, and English, but she didn’t want to learn a new language during high school so she took French and pretended she didn’t know it. Long story short, her first year didn’t count because the principal found out so he made her take Spanish and when I walked her to Spanish on the first day, she walked in and said, “Hoe-La uh-me-goats!” And personally I believe she might pull this off
Update: after two weeks of pulling it off, the teacher asked her to read something in Spanish and she forgot that she was supposed to sound inexperienced, so she read the whole thing in perfect Spanish. Her counselor is now considering transferring her to German
So there’s a Japanese slang term, ‘chuunibyou’, that roughly translates to “Middle School 2nd Year Syndrome.” It is used to describe the stupid phases people go through when they are 14, like pretend to be really hardcore, act like they know everything, say they have mystical powers, etc.
Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?
Deutsche Freunde, could you please create for me a word for the extreme depression I feel when I bend down to pick up a piece of litter and discover two more pieces of litter?
um = around
die Welt = world
die Umwelt = environment
ver = prefix to indicate something difficult or negative, a change that leads to deterioration or even destruction that is difficult to reverse or to undo, or a strong negative change of the mental state of a person
der Müll = garbage, trash, rubbish, litter
-ung = -ing
die Vermüllung = littering
ver- = see before
zweifeln = to doubt
-ung = see before
die Verzweiflung = despair, exasperation, desperation
die Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung = …
This is a german compound on the spot master class and I am LIVING
if anyone ever tells you that english isn’t ridiculous remember that the reason why we have a silent b in debt is because a group of guys got together to standardise english spelling and got to the word debt, which at the time was primarily spelled either ‘dett’ or ‘det’. so they basically went:
‘everyone speaks latin, right? so let’s put a silent b in debt. like debitum, which is latin for debt. problem solved.’
also the reason why there is a h in ghost is because when the printing press first came to england the only people trained to operate it were flemmish speaking, and they put a h after g because that’s what you do in flemmish. they put shit like ghirl and ghoose, but the only reason why ghost stuck is because people saw ‘the holy ghost’ in the bible and were like ‘well, that MUST be right’.
so yeah english is a really stupid language with some of the most ridiculous spelling
Anyone telling you that English isn’t a bullshit Frankenstein language is lying.
ifesbob 