> …’edges. Working in the UK in the early 1970s introduced me to Estuary English with its wide variates of h-dropping and h-adding, not to mention the fricatives and affricates…
> For a (supposedly) humourless bunch, the Germans come up with some choice plays on words. The billboard idea from SWR1, a local radio station, is a cool one just…
> This is the sort of thing that happens when people are given a new toy to play around with and there’s no user manual in the box. To wit:…
> Years ago, I worked with a girl who insulted me to core by claiming in a v. derogatory voice that my culinary skills “probably didn’t even stretch as far…
> I looked at this sign – it’s where you enter the market square in from of the Dom in Mainz – and thought…. “No. They can’t really mean that”…
> …chantarelle. Eh? That’s what comes from translating colloquialisms literally. As in “Darauf gebe ich keinen Pfifferling” Or “Not worth a red cent” I rather like chantarelles, though. Fry them…
>If there’s one thing they like around here, it’s “Ordnung” Which you can roughly translate as “order”, “orderliness” or “tidiness”. There are whole BOOKS on the subject – this translation…
>…..isn’t something that you’d often find in advertisements over here. There’s still a lot of numbing awfulness around, but ones like this play on words show that there’s hope Literally:…
>There’s German. And then there’s dialect. Potatoes are Kartoffeln. In Hochdeutsch – High German They’re also Erdapfel – “earth apples”, which is also what the French call them – Pommes…
>..just sound onomatopoetically distasteful. “Smear”, for example. To stain by or as if by spreading or daubing with a sticky, greasy, or dirty substance To stain or attempt to destroy…
>Don’t speak the local lingo? Or just want to catch up on news from home? No worries – you’re pretty well looked after as far as newspapers are concerned around…
>There’s no holding back the (not so) subtle infiltration of the German language by Americanisms. (This’ll get Bat on a rant….! For sure!) They could have written “Saisonendeabschlussverkauf”, of course.…
>There’s Mainzer And Määnzer And then there’s Meenzer. A definite pecking order. Here’s the definitionMainzer sind die zugezochene Määnzer sind die, die wo aach in Meenz gebore sinn, die Eldern…
>Stumbled over this just excellent example of corporate landscaping in the Weissliliengasse yesterday. A pillar of interior-lit sandblasted glass on a stainless steel plinth, set in a bed of pea…
Mainz Daily Photo 