“Public viewing” is one of those Denglisch words that baffle native English speakers. (We think it means the laying out a corpse for mourners to traipse past…)
Along with (the list is endless…):
Handy – mobile phone (Blank looks on aircraft when the cabin crew announce an impending departure and ask passengers to turn off their “handys“, plural in Denglisch simply involving tacking an “s” on at the end of the word, sometimes even with an apostrophe as an extra adornment. Bloody hell…)
Beamer – projector. (Ask your client to provide a beamer for a presentation and they’ll likely front up with a BMW…)
Bodybag – messenger bag (Not something you see coming out of a combat zone in a C130
Sprayer – tagger or graffiti artist
Normally, Public Viewing (someone even paptented the name) involves a massive screen, a sporting event and a cast of thousands of non-attenders.
Paul Bonna, barista extraordinaire, owner of kaffee kommune zwei and guest photographer does it differently.
He gets the guys from Wulle Biere, a private brewery in Stuttgart to front up for the most recent German game with their VW Bulli transporter, stuffs a flat screen TV in the back and – Robert ist Dein Onkel – you can entertain 60 or so avid football/beer/coffee fans for a couple of hours.
As in “I think comma that…?”
I definitely hate the way people indiscriminately use the apostrophe. But even native speakers (at least in my part of the world) get it wrong these days. And don’t get me started on Germans and their use of commas in English. They need a course in syntax!