Continuing the potato theme, here are some recent pictures I was sent by Robin
of Muntz. Robin of Muntz is a medieval-sounding name.
Here he is watching the World Cup.
And being offered more popcorn.
Muntz is really quite slim, as you can see here:
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A Bad Guide 
From his expression, grave but unsurprised, I suspect that he was (like myself) rooting for Argentina. Sorry, Muntz.
I think so too. But he was glad to see Spain win.
You don’t suppose Jim and Robin let him eat a tub of mouseberry crumble ice cream every night before bedtime ?
Nah, he’s just doing that cat thing of sitting like a little man. How nice to see Muntz again! He’s turned into a fine young fellow.
Oh what lovely fat & lazy cat is Muntz now!
Really, LH?
I myself was more than happy when Spain won.
If anything, they’d give him sorbet.
Looks rather svelte to me. Perhaps he’s been to the Diet of Worms.
Life is good.
De veras. But of course I was happy to see Spain win too, given the alternative. And they really are a superb team.
World Cup! I haven’t laughed that hard in a while! I also beamed reading the comments, proud papa — thanks all!
Of course, in certain rural parts of New Jersey the World Cup is an icecream.
As for potatoes, we’ve grown a variety called “Anya” this year – delish.
The local potatoes have had a rough year and it is anticipated that friets will be more expensive and shorter in the near future.
On the other hand Argentinia has dispensed with the coaching services of Diego Maradona, so there is hope yet.
Even though I wouldn’t want to have to sit next to him on an aeroplane ride to Argentina, I thought Maradona did a good job as a manager. I suppose you think he’s no good at cricket.
Aw, he’d get his hand to a few slip catches though.
He neglected to bring any players from Internazionale, and given that about half that team was Argentinian and had just won Yoorp’s League of Champions that looked a bit odd.
And kind words for his tactical acumen were hard to come by.
How did Muntz get his name? I haven’t studied the matter, but there was a fellow named Madman Muntz or Madman Earl Muntz or Earl Madman Muntz; I came across his name when looking up the history of 8-track tapes to satisfy the curiosity of my teenage son and myself …
Do you remember Crazy Eddie? According to Wikipedia,
Is it Muhntz or Moontz?
I’m sure it’s the former — but that’s only because I say it that way, really.
They’re so busy making toffee-flavoured ice cream that we may not get an immediate reply about why they chose the name.
We made an ice-cream once with liquorice toffee. Appearance – horrible. Flavour – sublime.
I hope they’re reading this. That sounds good.
Empty: Robin named him, and though I don’t believe there’s any story to it, maybe she’ll fill you on her thinking.
Dearie: Muhntz, definitely. Nickname — Munch.
Liquorice toffee, huh? I’ll let Robin comment on that, too. Our flavor of the week, which looks to become a standby for sure (we love it), is salted caramel. Salt is almost always great in desserts, and the burnt caramel flavor gives the sort of satisfying finish ice cream often lacks.
Crown: We’re always reading. Even if, after another twelve hour day with malfunctioning freezers, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc, we’re unable to contribute.
I like the thought that the ice cream shop proprietors love to eat the ice cream. It’s a good sign.
That makes good sense. Pepper might also be a suitable zestifier for certain things. I learned years ago here that you can grind a little black pepper onto off-season strawberries, with subtle results.
Maybe a very cautious addition of a little jalapeño to chocolate ice cream ? The better chocolate-makers did it here with chocolate bars, now they’re all on the bandwagon.
Maybe the pepper/spicy option could be called “Zest”, as in “Strawberry Plain/Zest”. I’m supposing that “Zest” is not already used to designate something else. “Zest” and “zing” are rather clapped-out advertising epithets, but I don’t know what else you could use that people could associate with that type of extra. “Zizz” I might associate with champagne. “Tingle” ? “Tingleberry topping” (strawberry/raspberry) ?
“Zizz” I associate with a snooze (as I do champagne).
I figured someone would catch me out on that. I remembered too late that it means “snooze” (“zizz” is unknown in America, I bet – I read it in Bonfiglioli). What I was trying to get at was “fizz”.
Zest is lemon peel in fine shreds.
I enjoy the accidental combination of chocolate and garlic: chocolate dessert when the mouth can still taste garlic from what went before. I wonder what happens if you add some form of garlic to the chocolate ice cream.
You probabaly wouldn’t like it. Just as if you put everything on your dinner plate into a blender, added gastric acids, let the blender do its thing, then drank the results.
Time, and the sequences of events in time. is of the essence (I’m not talking about “causality”, but “experience”). Yet somehow in the industrialized West this recognition has turned into an obsession with saving time, to the exclusion of other ways of dealing with it – such as waiting, looking and learning. People want to collapse sequences of events into a button they can push. They want to be experts without studying, they want to be famous rock singers although they can’t carry a tune in a handbasket, they want tomatoes in December. They want something for nothing, now.
empty: is there anything wrong, or intolerable, or inefficient, or at all unsatisfactory, about just finishing the garlic pizza and only then starting on the chocolate ice cream ? You might even wait a few seconds between the two courses, without losing an appreciable amount of precious time. You could even use those seconds to enhance your pleasure – by looking forward to the coming clash of tastes, savoring your anticipation. Everything appears to argue against putting the garlic in the ice cream – except that you would save a few seconds of time, and that the mixture might taste disgusting.
Strike that last clause: “, and that the mixture might taste disgusting”.
à chaque son propre dégoût
Actually his name is vide, not jacques.
A voyde vessel… maketh outward a gret soun, Mor than… what yt was ful.
Lydgate, Pilgrimage of Man, ante 1430 (l. 15933)
Great quote ! He’s going to like it, I bet. Is the context affirmative or deprecatory ? In a Christian homiletic it would generally be the latter. The Buddhists order these things differently, I think.
Stu, you’re right, the homiletic intent was as expected; yet I think his use of the figure was perhaps unconsciously affirmative, in that this was perhaps the most prolix poet ever to have writ English.
Lydgate was honour-laden, leaden, and emptier than the Buddhist version of Elysium. At his most windy, well, one would imagine the prospect of a gale of garlic saturated ice cream flung in one’s nostrils to have been more appealing than the prospect of an evening by the hearth with the latest Lydgate. Feed it to the mastiff, he’ll eat anything. (To each his own & c. notwithstanding.) His three most highly esteemed works ran to 30,000, 24,000 and 36,000 lines. All are virtually unreadable. Pilgrimage of Man is comparatively swift though likewise unreadable. But perhaps I am missing something. Dunbar, in Lament for the Makaris, rated Lydgate after only Chaucer. And I believe Madman Muntz spent much of his private time listening to audiobook versions of the Troy Book, The Siege of Thebes, and the Fall of Princes.
Were Lydgate alive and composing this comment, he would not conclude without a citation from Select Italian Proverbs: G. Torriano, 1642. Sacco vuoto non può star in piedi. An emptie sack cannot stand upright: nota, Applied to such as either pinch themselves, or are pincht by hard fortune.
@Tom: “A voyde vessel… maketh outward a gret soun, Mor than… what yt was ful.” A friend of mine was once walking in the late evening through Queens’ College, Cambridge. A brouhaha assaulted his ears; he peered into the room – it was a bunch of vicars having a dinner party. They were singing a song which went
“Empty vessels make the most noise….” and laughing immoderately.
dearieme,
Lovely.
And that’s the beauty of proverbs, is it not? Only those that stand the test of time and the slings of arrows of circumstance and the contents of vessels and context will survive.
Already by the time of Shakespeare this one had achieved “old saw” status —
“I did never know so full a voice issue from to empty a heart: but the saying is true — The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.” Henry V IV. iv. 64 —
and it sounds as though by the time it was decanted by those old vicars, it was just hitting its (hic) stride.
Speaking of the test of time, in my time at Cambridge there were more than few empty vessels about. Setting the old vicars among the proverbs for a bit of harmless merriment would have perhaps seemed the safest course, all things considered.
“… from to empty a heart…”
Make that “from so empty at heart.”
(The sort of mistake made by old vicars with empty vessels, you may think. But no, no such fun, it’s merely this nasty tumour in me thumb… impedes hunt and pecking no end… excuses, excuses…)
Any idea what the Wikipedia author had in mind with Plato (citation needed and do we really require hyperlinks from quotation, Greek and philosopher)?
Plutarch De Garrulitate had, “τῶν δ᾽ ἀδολέσχων διαρρέουσιν· εἶθ᾽ ὥσπερ ἀγγεῖα κενοὶ φρενῶν ἤχου δὲ μεστοὶ περιίασιν.”
Plutarch’s essay is remarkable on one count. Never has more been said about the virtue of saying nothing.
I get a very good class of comment at this blog. Another case of the Groucho club.
Stu, your rants are always a thrill, so I’m pleased to have set you off. Once more, you’ve knocked me off my Leerstuhl. Who but you could find the philosophical fallacy in “I wonder what happens if you add … garlic … ” ?
Hear, hear.
You guys are holding up a mirror to my soul – and I don’t like what I see there. No wonder I have only mixed social success. Implications and interpretations everywhere, and not a moment’s rest. I feel like a morsel of naked lunch on the end of a fork. Even now I’m doing it: no sooner does empty make an appreciative remark, than I start analyzing the literary and cosmopsychological implications. <* sob! *>
Crown always recommends closer relationships with animals as a remedy for overwroughtness. Since he’s already got a monopoly on the goat caper, maybe I should go for sheep.
Do go for sheep, HAL. You won’t regret it.
“HAL”: I hesitate to say this, given your condition, but I believe that the only way through this difficulty is to respond in kind to your emotional honesty.
The simple admiration that I expressed in that “appreciative remark” was not the whole story; it was masking some difficult feelings on my part. I will own that a part of me felt blindsided when you took my naive suggestion about a new flavor combo and, if I may so express myself, poured gastric juices on it and ran it through the blender of your formidable intellect. I felt like I had been splattered around the kitchen. I tried to suppress these feelings, but I have no doubt that some of my hurt was perceptible to sensitive nature like yours. It is no wonder that you were somehow disturbed by what I wrote, even if you did not fully understand why. You don’t miss much, and I am sure that can be both a blessing and a curse.
Good luck with the sheep.
Personally I recommend pigs. Pigs is equals.
I love pigs — my daughter and I were admiring some just the other day — but let’s agree never to return to the “That’s why they call them pigs” theme.
A pig and a butterfly in a Codd bottle?
Which reminds me of a sheep, two pigs and a butterfly in a Codd bottle>.
Yes, empty, I sensed that: I almost wrote “quasi-appreciative remark” originally. It was all actually supposed to be a joke – but I guess I play too hard sometimes.
I think Crown has got my number. When I overstep the mark, he does some fancy footwork and gets in little rapier cuts before I know what’s happening.
Pigs I would find more congenial than sheep, I’m pretty sure. When they get impertinent, all you have to do is say “rasher” and they calm down.
Regarding pigs is equals, I saw a remarkable thing last week on TV. A surgeon was showing medical students how to stitch wounds together. He made wound-imitating incisions in the skin of a large pig’s foot, because the skin is very similar to that of humans, as he said. There were several pig’s feet (pig feets ?) on the OP table. All I could think of was that such yummy-looking items, in pickled form, are hard to come by in Cologne.
Bill, it never stopped being a joke; I should have put in a :-) somewhere in my last post to make that clear. Your perspectives on both the Trouble With People Today and The Nature of Existence are always refreshing and stimulating. I never know when they’re coming, but when they do come they feel so inevitable and so right ! In this case I laughed out loud with delight, even though I felt wronged — happy to be gristle for your mill.
I might try the strawberries with black pepper. I googled it and saw recipes that also involve Balsamic vinegar. Is that the idea?
Among Vancouver, BC Italian ice-cream parlours there is La Casa Gelato. Last time I was there (several years ago) it had 125 flavours. I just looked up their website, which dates from 2009, with 218 flavours, but the first page claims 508 flavours! That seems like overkill.
Amont the 125 flavours were several non-sweet ones, such as gorgonzola. I did not try it, but perhaps next time.
Balsamic vinegar
Don’t get me going on that. Apart from the fact that strawberries and balsamico (depends on the type, I suppose) sounds pretty effete, that balsamico has taken control over restaurants and company canteens here in the last few years. There is no longer a bottle of wine vinegar on offer, or even of that nasty cheap acetic acid (diluted) straight out of Chemistry 101 that you find in the supermarkets.
gorgonzola
In Austin I was once at a posh dinner for four whose main course was a cold cherry soup. The dessert was avocado ice cream.
I just remembered the name of the guy who prepared it: Dawen Hawkins. He was a hairdresser with a very elegant house – I remember one room painted in merde d’oie, the name of which I learned on that occasion. Dawen was extremely thin. I found out later that he had stomach ulcers and had been operated on several times. He ended up killing himself.
Such are memories: enter cherries, exit left.
I think more than 5 flavours is overkill, if they’re any good. Not that I’m an expert compared to other commenters.
I saw some merde d’oiseau today that was a lovely pink from the cherries they’ve been eating in the garden.
¡jajajajajaja!
(sorry, stupid comment, but I could not resist)
I think more than 5 flavours is overkill, if they’re any good.
I think more than 2 flavors is vulgar and excessive, in ice cream at any rate. I feel differently about curries.
Stu, forget that I ever mentioned the balsamico.
So when you add black pepper to strawberries are there any further ingredients? Is it just “Erdbeeren entblatten und in nicht sehr dicke Scheiben schnitten. Leicht mit frischgemahltem Pfeffer bedecken.”
Was there gorgonzola in the cherry soup?
empty: yes, just those two things. Maybe a little sugar, depending on the quality of the berries.
Your description is quite good. Let me just tweak a few slices into shape: entblättern, schneiden, frisch gemahlenem
There was nothing solid in the soup, not even bits of cherry. I should have said that it was only slightly chilled, not cold. Maybe there was cheese later, I can’t remember. I don’t think Texas did gorgonzola in the mid-sixties.
Perhaps you know that entblättern is also the jocular word for what ecdysiasts do ? The WiPe on “striptease” says that Mencken is credited with having invented “ecdysiast”, at the request of Gypsy Rose Lee for “a more dignified way to refer to her profession”.
I once had a dessert of vanilla icecream with black pepper seeds and armagnac (were there mint leaves too? I should remember that.) in what was then a gourmet restaurant (the only one around here). I’ve tried to make it myself, carefully adapted to the fine traditions of the lump-together-by-slight-of-hand school of cuisine, but for some reason it doesn’t seem to turn out well.
Doesn’t sound that hard. Maybe it needs to be flambéd (sp ?) ? The coolest TV cooks use a welding torch for that extra Rambo finish.
You’re very kind, Stu. I almost guessed entblättern. Damn! And schneiden I should have known — no excuse. Perhaps on a good day, or under hypnosis, I could have come up with the correct participle of mahlen.
I didn’t really want bedecken. I wanted to “sprinkle” or “dust” the berries with pepper, but I didn’t have a verb for that, and the game I was playing was “do your best quickly without dictionary”. There was a noun for “dust” on the tip of my tongue — now it comes to me, hours later — Staub — but I was pretty sure that if I tried to make a verb of it I would just get dirt on the strawberries, so I just went ahead and put what was probably too much pepper on them.
I was thinking of ecdysiast the other day, because the word apodyopsis came up in a game show on the radio. I don’t think it’s a real word. It’s supposed to mean “mentally undressing someone”.
Have I mentioned that once, years ago, I encountered some clam chowder ice cream? I now wish I had tasted it, but in fact I just took some home for my cat. It hadn’t been selling well, I think. They were giving it away.
the correct participle of mahlen
Here’s something that may interest you and Crown. Germans sometimes get the participles wrong – plain folks, that is, not learnèd ones. A frequent example is schleifen. There are two words whose infinitive is schleifen.
One schleifen means “drag , whet, raze” and is conjugated schleifte, geschleift. It has transitive uses: ein Messer an einem Schleifstein schleifen (“whet [wetzen !] a knife on a whetstone”), and intransitive ones when things “do” something, just like “drag”: die Vorhänge schleifen auf dem Boden (“the curtains are dragging on the floor”). Remember Schleife is a loop (Endlosschleife), a bow (as on a present, or in a woman’s hair), or a turn (like a river makes, or an airplane).
The other schleifen means “polish, sand” (like lenses, or a surface using sandpaper) and is conjugated schliff, geschliffen. It has only transitive uses. Remember that a diamond has a good or bad Schliff. Also, the “sandpaper” words: Schleifpapier, Sandpapier, Schmirgelpapier, and the fact that many early scientists in the 1600s, like Leeuwenhoek, were lense-grinders (Linsenschleifer) to earn money, and to make special lenses for microscopes and telescopes.
You see how the confusion about the words can arise: in both cases something is being pulled/moved across something else. The flub-up is to say, for example: ich habe die Kiste Bier allein nach Hause geschliffen.
All this works fine when you talk and read a lot, using and reusing the standard phrase patterns. It’s only when you don’t do that – or when you are preparing a little tract on the subject, as I am now doing – that you occasionally become uncertain and feel the urge to consult a dictionary (or not, if you’re a plain folk).
The following rule of thumb should help: when you hear Schliff, think of diamonds and schliff, geschliffen, and vice versa. Everything else is schleifte, geschleift.
Diamonds and “spiffy”.
Yes, but you wouldn’t really say, “die Erdbeeren entblättern”, would you? Recipes usually say “entstielen” or just “putzen”.
No, you wouldn’t, of course. I didn’t want to give empty a hard time about idioms as well. It was clear what he meant.
He himself found out later that bedecken is not the right word, because you don’t want to “cover” the strawberries with pepper.
I mean that what he said was grammatically OK, aber halt ein wenig schief in der Wortwahl .
bruessel, don’t you also find it quite difficult sometimes to “correct” someone, even at their request, who has uttered several sentences that are just slightly off ?! For one “slightly off” word it’s fairly easy to find a more apposite one. It’s not so easy when the whole thing is slightly schief. I have experienced this with German as well as English.
Isn’t Schiefer slate?
Yes. schief is “tilted, awry, out-of-kilter”. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is ein schiefer Turm. I don’t know whether it is constructed of slate. That would be a Schieferturm. Maybe the Italian architect’s German was not that good.
Hey, guys, I was just fooling around, in the full expectation that the result would be pretty much laughable.
I was surprised to hear that one says anything like entblatten for taking the green bits off a strawberry, and am not at all surprised to hear now that it’s not true. (Even in English we don’t say “defoliate” in that context, or “unleaf”, or anything of the kind. We sometimes say “hull”, oddly. Those green bits are probably not leaves to a botanist, either, not that it matters for this purpose. Bracts? Sepals?)
About “bedecken”, I was trying to say that I knew it was wrong along but just put it down for lack of a better idea.
My one example of a German verb with two conjugations, so to speak, is schaffen.
I think slate might be dodgy to build on, which may account for the schiefness of the Turm.
But it could have a slate roof. This might be slately schief independently of the tower’s inclinations. And these might differ from the architect’s preferences.
Claudia Schiefer is by no means flat.
I’m going to stop now.
Maybe there was cheese later, I can’t remember.
That sounds like a line of dialogue from a New Wave movie, perhaps by Resnais or Antonioni. I picture prematurely desiccated expatriates reminiscing languidly about the not distant past, with columns in the background.
a little tract on the subject
Which (it hardly requires saying) I greatly appreciated.
don’t you also find it quite difficult sometimes to “correct” someone, even at their request, who has uttered several sentences that are just slightly off ?
Hence that comment by m-l that I extracted from the Log (a delicate process involving tweezers and formaldehyde) and posted about recently.
I should add that I am inordinately fond of black pepper. Mmm, steak au poivre…
I love black pepper too. I knew a man in Germany who would eat bread-and-butter and black pepper at Italian restaurants while he was waiting for his main course. Huge quantities of the stuff are supposed to be bad for the kidneys, though.
I was going to say that schief is undoubtedly related to English skew, but now I have my doubts.
“don’t you also find it quite difficult sometimes to “correct” someone, even at their request, who has uttered several sentences that are just slightly off ?”
Yes of course, and you don’t want to discourage people too much, but at the same time, I don’t think you should let them believe that something is commonly used by native speakers when it is not. If you have to rephrase the whole thing, so be it. After all, if they’ve asked you to correct them, it’s because they want to learn.
I knew someone (in NY) called Schieferdecker, I think he had Dutch ancestry; it must mean “slate roofer”.
After all, if they’ve asked you to correct them, it’s because they want to learn.
There’s the rub, then. empty didn’t ask me to correct him, so I didn’t go the whole nine yards.
Schieferdecker
It’s actually in Duden, as a “regional” equivalent to Dachdecker (roofer). Do you suppose slate was more common in olden times as a roofing material than it is today (pretty expensive as compared to tiles, I think) ? Maybe there are words for different kinds of roofer: some specialized in slate, others in straw etc.
In the future I will try to remember to flag my degree of openness to correction.
I imagine one could put together a fine hand-crafted German noun meaning “degree of openness to correction regarding grammar and idiom”.
It’s reassuring to know that, if nothing else, at least we’ve all got our priorities straight around here.
Satzbausteinadäquanzkorrekturoffenheitsgrad
More simply, Satzadäquanzkorrekturoffenheitsgrad
Tom, that cartoon is awesome. How did you know that was me (especially frittering away my time on Yahoo answers)?
Is Satzbaustein your own invention, Stu, or do Germans really build their sentences with stone? Like the third Little Pig with his huffing-and-puffing-Big-Bad-Wolf-proof house?
A Baustein is a building block, literally and figuratively, just as in English. Prudent pigs use them in houses, children play with wooden ones, and matter can be said to be made of them. Duden gives for example: Die Physiker fahnden nach immer kleineren Bausteinen der Natur.
So Satzbausteine are just the component parts of a sentence. In this figurative sense you can also say Bauteile.
Via Google Earth you will find Schweinheim, the village incorporated into Bonn-Bad Godesberg that was once considered as a film location for “The Three Little Pigs”.
Hmm… wild guess, I guess.
How odd … I have just noticed that the order of the components in such compound expressions is essentially the reverse of that of the words in the English equivalent. It must sound rather unlikely, but it honestly had not occurred to me before. I suppose it would have if I translated a lot. Normally I just use the one or the other language.
I must have noticed it when learning German, but have forgotten it since then.
No, as a speaker of English it seems perfectly natural to me that prepositionless noun phrase component ordering would go in the opposite direction from the ordering of components in a noun phrase with prepositions.
That’s a convincing preposition, I must say.
Backward ran his sentences until reeled the mind.
Ø : No, as a speaker of English it seems perfectly natural to me that
prepositionless noun phrase component ordering
(= the old Germanic substratum order)
would go in the opposite direction from
the ordering of components in a noun phrase with prepositions.
(= the French/Romance superstratum order)
Beautiful demonstration, Ø !
BTW, I never said that the phenomenon was “unnatural”. I never would say that, because I don’t think it’s the case. I merely said that it is the case.
I.e. I merely said that the phenomenon is there for all to see.
Maybe there are words for different kinds of roofer: some specialized in slate, others in straw etc.
Yes. I doubt that Margaret Thatcher’s ancestors knew how to do a slate roof. They have them a lot here: huge slate tiles, two or three feet square, set up on a diagonal grid (i.e. as diamonds rather than squares). They look really beautiful too. They must be very heavy.
Which weighs more, Crown, a slate roof (say in the style of the Welsh slates used in Britain) or a thatched roof – straw or reed as the case may be?
I merely said that it is the case.
You also said that it
must sound rather unlikely
When I said that it sounds “natural”, I really meant that it does not strike me as unlikely.
Gosh, dearie… I’m guessing slate, by a lot, but it’s only a guess, I’d have to look it up. The slate has to be quite thick when it’s in such big bits and I’m guessing the thatch isn’t thicker than a straw bale, which isn’t as dense as hay and I can lift very easily (hay’s quite heavy).
Presumably even the best straw or reed absorbs a bit of water? And then there’s the weight of the wildlife that takes up residence. I handled slates as a youth – they weren’t heavy, being remarkably thin. But I too would guess that the slate roof weighs more. Certainly after a fire.
And small slate roof tiles, which they also have here, are thinner & lighter than terra-cotta tiles.
AJP, I have only seen those diagonally placed, heavy slates in Italian Alpine villages, just over the French border on the road to Turin. In my grandparents’ village in Southern France there were old slate roofs with large, thick slates at the lower edge of the roof, getting smaller as you go up. Those are the old, “hand”-made slates. The industrial ones are thinner and very evenly cut.
Thatcher: it was not Margaret’s own name, but her husband’s.
Of course, it was Dennis’s name. Silly me.
Yes’, I’m thinking of the hand-split ones. The bigger one that they make nowadays are still a bit thicker than, say, 8″x8″ tiles are. I can’t believe a two-foot square is less than 5/8″ or 3/4″ thick.
must sound rather unlikely
empty, I meant it must sound unlikely that I of all people should say such a thing – Í the holder-forth on things German.
Sig had a post about roofing in Mars, I think with bamboo and something else. It was much more complicated than I might have imagined. I’ve also been amazed by the complexity of reed thatching in Northern Germany, as seen on German TV.
Sig had a wonderful post on thatching. I meant to say that. Unfortunately I can’t find it on his site. It’s got great photographs.
roofing on Mars begins here
” I can’t believe a two-foot square is less than 5/8″ or 3/4″ thick”: Good God, why? I think the thin Welsh jobs seem a better bet.
My memory is of slates somewhere about 4 or 5mm thick – googling suggests that my memory is correct (not a given, alas). So why the thick Continental slates? Are their slates just feak and weeble?
AJP,
Herewith, Slates.
The pictures and text sit nicely by each other. When I saw the title, my initial thought was “typo for reverie” …
Dem’s thick slates, Tom. I’d guess that a feak and weeble geology produced those. The Welsh jobbies are Just Better Stuff.
I do like the look of those. In fact this is currently a practical consideration (roofing that is, but alas not the possibility of Welsh slates) as we are scrimping by rather badly here on shredded plastic tarpaulins in moss-overgrown sedimentary layers where once long ago were composition and gravel topping. In comparison those Welsh slates look almost as sound and permanent as… what? sheets of teflon lined with kryptonite?
Those are lovely slates, Tom.
Okay, 3/8″, Dearie. And that’s my final offer. The truth is I haven’t spec’d slate for twenty years, so my memory might be a bit off. There’s no serious snow load on roofs in Whales, though, so the slate might be a bit thinner there.
Here it’s principally the wind and rain that bothers the roof, AJP. Heaven only knows what the problems might be like had we a Moby Dick or two flopping around up there.
(Here is the moment, Arthur, in which I am haunted by my inexpertise in making those funny punctuation symbols that show joking is meant. Perhaps I shall demand an instruction kit for those when I put in my bulk order for Chinese made laminated holy card shingles…)
They will make a fine roof.
I can make a fish >(:)
and a strand of seaweed §=%==%===
but not a whale.
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Very like a whale.
Not so much, actually. Bah.
Really, LH?
It looks like a whale viewed trying to hide behind a fence.
I meant to delete “viewed”, which is a vestige of an earlier draft of the comment.
That’s a terrific whale, Language! Well done! Knowing about the fence helps.
I’ve no idea how he did that.
I like the way that the whale has his head turned towards us, the better to show off his antlers.
I copied it, or tried to, from a site with ASCII art. I obviously failed miserably. Stick to language, Hat, and leave art to the artsy!
I think the antlers are a fluke.
It’s funny, because it looks exactly the same in HTML.
I think it’s a really great whale. The Prince of Whales could have it as a symbol instead of three feathers. Whoever heard of a whale with feathers?
Come to think of it, it would be fun to draw the animal with everything: feathers, wings, antlers, eight legs, fins, a handbag and a tail.
[Lady Bracknell]A handbag?![/Lady Bracknell]
Yes, please, do it Crown!
(don’t you dare forget the handbag!)
I like the way that the whale has his head turned towards us, the better to show off his antlers.
That’s a snail. Well spotted. Well, striped. A well spotted slug is a Lymax. Which is a tool for cutting fruits. By a banana slugger.
The Prince of Whales could have it as a symbol
Probably. Or fyrsten av Hvaler.
I think I will, when I have more time.
I am thinking of Eric Carle’s “The Mixed Up Chameleon”. I wish I could find an image of the page where the chameleon has copied features of all of the other animals in the zoo. Add a handbg to that and you’d be done.
Thanks, I’ll try and find it.
And so, at a small lake in Østmarka, the hopeful whale-watch continues…
This thread has been advancing neck and neck (or pari passu, for you Latinists) with my FODDER FOR ALLUSIONS thread, which is now at 148 comments.
Though this one is much more pleasant.
And almost as dramatic, what with the unexpected whale drawing.
I say its antlers, but it might be a rudimentary crown.
This thread has been advancing neck and neck (or pari passu, for you Latinists) with my FODDER FOR ALLUSIONS thread
Well, if it’s a race, here’s another for the Muntz thread. Sorry, Hat: it’s Muntz.
Aaaaand … it’s Muntz by a whisker !
Well, he did have the advantage. Playing at home.
Baaaa.
It’s just me and the goats, is it?
Goats don’t say “Baaaa”. I thought you were with the sheep, so I didn’t want to intrude. What do goats say in English, I’ve forgotten ? In German the description of how they speak is meckern, which also means to gripe and complain.
By the way, Crown, this editor area is an improvement over the previous one. It also supports more tags.
It has transitive uses: ein Messer an einem Schleifstein schleifen (“whet [wetzen !] a knife on a whetstone”)
Dammit, this is of course not an example for schleifen meaning “drag,
whet, raze”, but for the other one: “polish, sand, whet“. I got carried away with transitive/intransitive examples.The last two days on tv the word geschliffen has turned up often. I suppose I’m just noticing it more often, in order to check whether anyone flubs up. That’s how I realized I had misplaced my example.
If you want a verb analogous to meckern, I suppose it would be bleat. But this applies to sheep at least as much as goats. Likewise, I believe that goats and sheep both say “baa” in English. Some authors may have the sheep saying “maa” instead. Or is it the goats — I’m not really sure. I hope that on the Day of Judgement the powers that be will get their shibboleths sorted out, because as I understand there is separate seating for the two groups.
In Spanish is the same, both for goats and sheep: “balido” (that’s the name of the sound they make). And they both say “beee” (“e” like in “May”)
It looks that goats and sheep speak the same language, despite their differences…
My corpus of English citations is culled from comix. There, a goat wouldn’t have a speech bubble containing “baaa”, but rather “bleat” or something else – surely !!?? “Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool ?” – what could be clearer as to the seating area ? Does anybody have a goat quote from a comic book ? Wasn’t there a “Billy the Goat” series, like “Fritz the Cat” and “Mister Ed the Talking Horse” ? Have goats been discriminated against in the graphic amusement arts ?
Julia, how odd that Spanish goats and sheep both say “beee”. Were they forced to go to the same schools ? Maybe Goat, like Catalán, has just been repressed.
I’m a city boy, yet I bet I could tell the sheep from the goats just by their sounds, without seeing them. I mean Continental goats, of course. Who knows what caprilectos there are in Argentina, ¿verdad?
Is it generally known that sneezing is specific to the language you speak ? In Germany people sneeze so that the sound hatchí or hátchi comes out – they can’t do “achoo”.
Hmm, Stu, I’m also a city girl but I can’t differentiate goats from sheep by their sound (¡No idea at all!)
We should study what happened with the repressed voice of the goats (or sheep’s)
In Spanish we sneeze “achís” or “achús”… we’re so free and versatile!! You, Germans, wouldn’t understand! ;-)
Sez here that a goat will learn to talk like a sheep if raised with sheep from infancy.
Other way round, actually.
Yes, sheep are so easily led …
Julia, do Spanish speakers who leave off the final “s” in plurals also sneeze “achís” and “achús”, or “achí” and “achú” ?
Y soy de Texas, no de Alemania !
167!
We can catch that fucker!
Lets…
GO!!!!
I’m sorry.
That should have been…
“Let’s”
Wrong thread, I think …
Yes, sure, Stu…
Ich bin aus Malaysia, you know?
Malaysia, no, I didn’t know that !
You’ll never catch up with FODDER!
Oops, I’m not helping my own cause, am I?
My wife, a country gal who has spent time around both species, says goats as well as sheep say Baa. (I did not tell her which side I was on, so as to avoid spousal prejudice.) So there.
My wife, not really a country gal but an animal-lover, says that sheep say “baa” while goats say “maa”; I wish I spoke IPA so that I could discuss the vowles easily.
No, Hat…
…you’re not helping.
And I would say the same as empty’s wife.
In Spanish, of course, one says “Beee”, the other says “Mee”
But I don’t know which is which.
(In Spanish spoken in Malaysia)
http://astrogeology.findthebest.com/detail/1949/Djabran-Fluctus
“Origin: Abkhazian goddess of goats.”
Comment box ate my comment.
I’m not sure I like this new blog format. Whatever happened to the column “Recent comments”? Now I don’t know where to look first.
Yes. I always used “recent comments”.
Me too. Bring back “Recent comments”!
You can always sign up for notification of new comments.
“In Spanish is the same, both for goats and sheep: “balido” (that’s the name of the sound they make). And they both say “beee” (“e” like in “May”)”. It was once solemnly explained to me that the Greek letter Beta was known to have been pronounced, in classical times, with the first vowel as in May; this was known because sheep were reported as saying “Be”. I objected on the grounds that in English we can’t even agree whether sheep say Baa or Meh, and anyway what do schoolteachers know about the dialects of Classical Greek Sheepish? Anyway, anyway, how come it’s “beee” in Spanish rather than “veee”???
That was for me, dearieme? I don’t undestand… ¿Me repite la pregunta?
/b/ and /v/ sound the same way in Spanish…
And for us, goats and sheep also say Meee or Beee
Ah, and I also want the “recent comments” box back!
/b/ and /v/ sound the same way in Spanish…
That was the point of my laboured joke, Julia: that beee and veee may sound the same in Spanish, but don’t in English. Though “Vugger it” might make a pretty good expostulation in English, especially if said by Germans.
Oh, yes… :-D
Very good joke, dearieme, I’m just dull and ignorant of your tongue, you know.
How many comments, by now?
It says 196 so I suppose this’ll be 197. Perhaps we should debate whether it’ll reach the double ton.
Oh, I think it will.
If by “the double ton” you mean
200.
Now let’s go for 2 to the fighting 8th power.
The next target would be the double Nelson, but I fear that this is getting sili.
I’m glad you’ve been working so hard for little Muntz, while I was away. I’m sure this is the largest number of comments either of us has ever got. We’re very happy about it and will soon be adding advertising; we’re hoping the additional income will allow Muntz to go to college some day.
Apparently the blogging authorities have been messing about with all the gizmos with one advantage I can see: the comments box is bigger. There are some worthless html tags below; I think you have to copy & paste them. I don’t know why they took away the “Recent Comments”, but I’ve put them back. I’m thinking of suing wordpress for causing us all so much stress.
I have been in the mountains for a few days. Tomorrow I’ll post a picture of me chopping down a tree.
Also dearieme, I’ve finished reading the Trevor-Roper biography (it was raining one of the days I was up there) and Adam Sisman (the author) says it’s like so totally not true that T-R didn’t speak German. I’ll give you the whole paragraph tomorrow.
Since I first reported my wife’s deduction (and awesome disillusionment, like totally) that his understanding of colloquial spoken German was approximately nil, I have learnt that apparently he tried to excuse his great cock-up by admitting being unable to read the gothic (or whatever the right word is) script used in the “Hitler diaries”. That’s very odd – she learnt to read it at school; why didn’t he? I never learnt it, having learnt to read “Scientific German”, all in Latin lettering. Insofar as memory serves: Die Schwefelsaure ist im Schranke – handy stuff, eh? (Sorry about the omitted umlaut – I know where but not how). (As the bishop said….)
I’m bad at remembering rhymes, and even badder at remembering chemistry stuff. Yet there’s a useful German rule of thumb for stinks procedure that’s served me well in the kitchen:
Meaning, as to the order in which to add liquids to a mixture: “First the water, then the acid, else you’ll have a monstrous surprise”.
On my machine first you type the umlaut and then the letter, and they end up aligned — except on letters it doesn’t approve of like in the name David Marjanovi´c.
What I learnt from Adam Sisman’s biography was that Trevor-Roper — who was a classics scholar at Oxford — learned German as a student, starting in 1933, because ‘a classical scholar ought to be able to read the writings of the dominant figure in classical studies, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff’. Also he was thinking of eventually joining the foreign service.
He spent the summer with a family in Vienna. In 1935, he lived with a family in Freiburg during spring vacation to brush up his fluency. Later, about the diaries, Sisman says:
AJP & the recent comments box are back!!!
I don’t know which makes me happier… ;-)
Nor do I (well I was having a good time). I think the “Recent Comments” is longer now too.
Erst das Wasser,
Dann die Säure,
Sonst geschieht
Das Ungeheure.
I don’t think it’s just for stinks in the kitchen, it’s that the acid will explode in your face if you do it the wrong way around. But Chemistry was always my worst subject too.
Our goats all say maaah, but they each say it differently. I say it back to them all the time as a greeting. Once, when I tried it with some sheep down the road, they wouldn’t answer. Then one of them did — but it was with such a loud and deep bass voice that I felt quite silly. I’ve never done it with sheep since, I can’t reach that low.
I don’t think it’s just for stinks in the kitchen
What I mean is that it is a chemistry rule of thumb, and as such applies to kitchen chemistry: don’t pour water into hot oil. What happens is not that the acid or oil “explodes”, but rather that the dispersing water evaporates violently in small amounts, but many small amounts, thus spattering water, acid and oil all over you.
I commend a mnemonic of my own: Add the Acid. Very terse, English.
I think there’s an English rhyme too. I can’t remember it, though.
Beer before wine
Works fine.
Wine before beer
And you’ll feel pretty queer.
Of course it may be “after” rather than “before”, so best to avoid it all together.
Oh that’s a good one, dearie.
Welcome back, and thanks for the Recent Comments!
If Muntz needs recommendations for college, I’m sure we’ll all be happy to supply them.
A quick search for English versions yields:
Here lies Gillian, still and placid;
Who added water to the acid.
Clever Jane did as she oughter;
Added acid to the water.
and the simpler
Do like you oughter,
Add acid to water.
The first, in its wordiness, reminds me a little of the rhyme that the young jaguar uses to try to remember the proper procedures for dealing with a hedgehog and a tortoise in “The beginning of the Armadillos”.
I think that, on balance, your quotation rather supports her hypothesis.
I start from Sisman’s statement that implies that my beloved is not the first to have questionned Very Ropey’s command of German. So it would seem that there is a prima facie case to answer.
Let’s start with the lesser issue of his problems with the script. “Gerhard Weinberg [a Nazi-specialist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill], who was born in Germany, had similar difficulty in deciphering the diaries.” To omit to mention that good old Gerhard left Germany when he was ten years old seems to me to be quite improper: until the Forces of Progress seized command of the schools, it was customary for children to learn a vast amount after age 10. (For instance, I couldn’t read bloody Chaucer when I was ten but I could at fourteen.) Did German primary schoolboys learn the script in question before age 10 in the thirties? Sisman doesn’t say they did, so my guess is that they didn’t. I’ll grant that Gerhard worked on German material all his life, but largely in the USA. Clearly no-one there taught him it either. Tough titty, but I’m damned if I see why that somehow excuses Very Ropey’s recklessness at opining on material that he couldn’t even read.
Now the major issue: could he understand colloquial spoken German? My wife’s hypothesis, let me remind you, was formed when she watched the televised press conference about his making such a arse of himself over the Hitler Diaries. She noticed that he handled the questions in English perfectly well but couldn’t cope with the questions in German. Since she understood them perfectly well, and since he heard the English questions clearly enough, it immediately occurred to her that the old bugger was a fraud. This was a shock – she’d been taught modern history by a disciple of his and his “The Last Days of Hitler” had been held up as a model. But there you are; facts are chiels that winna ding. He hadn’t understood the questions.
TO BE CONTINUED
To omit to mention that good old Gerhard left Germany when he was ten years old seems to me to be quite improper
Actually, somewhere before this he says he was “German born”. The bracketed bit was my description.
He said he answered in English because he’d be able to be more precise. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs Dearie is correct in that he was bluffing to some extent. I for one wouldn’t want to doubt her opinion. I wonder if we can find the press conference on Youtube…?
We’re first told that, in German, he’s an autodidact and that his aim was “to be able to read the writings of..”. We also learnt that he approached it in the way he studied Greek – and again it’s clear that he studied it as a written tongue, not a spoken one. True (I assume) he spent some weeks in German-speaking countries but it may be that spending time with families in the school holidays might have resulted in conversation mainly with the children. That these weeks made him competent in understanding everyday spoken German isn’t actually claimed. No wonder. My own relevant experience is in French – it used to be that if I limited the ambition of what I said, I was well understood (and was even once mistaken for a native) but understanding rapid fire French was usually beyond me. When, however, the French understood me to be etranger, slowed down, enunciated with clarity, and cut out the slang and the abstruse idioms, then I coped well. And yet I had had a better education in French than poor old Ropey had in German. (I had had the advantage of conversation classes, taking dictation, reciting poetry, singing drinking songs, and the other jolly japes of the olden times. I had picked up some slang by reading one of Camus’s novels in French at school, just for fun. ) Even if we assume that his Oxford pals are telling unvarnished truth, the German of their “conversations” with Ropey may well have been equivalently dumbed down and would probably have been pretty remote from the grasp of German required for interviews with Nazi gangsters in 1945.
So, what Sisman tells us does not remotely add up to sufficient reason to suppose that Ropey could have a complete, full speed, colloquial German conversation with adults. Indeed the absence of any such explicit claim is the silence that speaks a thousand words. My wife is right – he was a fake.
This business about T-R’s command of German: shouldn’t it make one also wonder about his colleagues’ command of the same ? If nobody called him on this before the Diary Incident, perhaps their cards were pretty worthless too ?
I am always amazed how often simple German is misspelled even in the TLS, even when it’s only a book title – in last week’s edition, for example. You could put it down to incompetent proofreaders, but …
The impropriety I was alluding was Sisman’s not yours, Crown. To imply, as he did, that good old Gerhard provided a natural measure of the difficulty of reading an antique script by remarking that he was German born, while suppressing the fact that he’d left as a ten year old, strikes me as distinctly, shall we say, naughty.
It wasn’t the school holidays, he was a student when he was learning German.
There’s the evidence of two German colleagues about his spoken German:
On the other hand, if he was supposed to have done all his postwar interrogations in German, you’d expect him to be fluent.
Crown, this is the 21st century in the Western World. We have only post-mortem asseverations about a man who lived in the public eye for most of his 89 years. That that should need to be adduced as evidence, is sufficiently damning in itself, I would have thought.
This business about T-R’s command of German: shouldn’t it make one also wonder about his colleagues’ command of the same ?
In the Hitler diaries incident his colleagues were British journalists, apart from the other authentication “experts”, who were German. They probably didn’t speak German. His academic colleagues who were Germans seem to have thought his German was okay. If there was anything seriously wrong with his German the Stern employees would have said something at the press conference, I think.
That that should need to be adduced as evidence, is sufficiently damning in itself, I would have thought.
You mean people were covering for him? Not kicking him when he was down? There were plenty who would have been delighted to give him a good kicking.
Ach, Crown, it WAS the school holidays in Germany. “He spent the summer with a family in Vienna. In 1935, he lived with a family in Freiburg during spring vacation”. See? The little krauts would be at home for the funny English student to talk to.
Well, there we have it. In Vienna only a semblance of German is spoken.
You mean people were covering for him?
No, I mean that the absence of anything more substantial than post-mortem witnesses, and a railway ticket from a spring vacation in Freiburg (discounting Vienna), is pretty sparse evidence over 89 years for someone who is supposed to “have grasped” German.
The other insinuation I made was that people were covering for each other – T-R and his academic colleagues. Non-krauts hiding under cabbage-leaves, as’t were.
as ’twere ?
sparse evidence over 89 years for someone who is supposed to “have grasped” German.
Well he also deciphered German messages at GCHQ during the war. He had Gilbert Ryle & Stuart Hampshire working for him. Then he was sent to Berlin to find out whether the Fúhrer had actually died. Apparently a lot of people, including Stalin, were wondering. And then he interviewed a whole bunch of Nazis, including Speer & Ribbentrop.
“Well he also deciphered German messages at GCHQ during the war.” Yes, but no-one here is arguing that he couldn’t READ German when presented with it nicely typed in a familiar font. When I was in my early twenties I could do so too. I passed an exam to confirm the fact (which is more than he did, I suspect). It doesn’t mean that I could have held up my end of a conversation in German and neither, it seems, could he. (A “conversation” with Oxford cronies who might have been speaking, for all we know, in the style of Frankie Howerd addressing the older members of his audience, doesn’t count.) So how did he “interview”? With an interpreter, I’ll be bound.
Look, has anyone ever said “His German was perfectly serviceable. He could joke with Nazis about the quality of tobacco, answer their questions about wartime shortages in Britain, tell them about the progress of the war with the Japanese, and grill them about the detail of domestic, political and strategic life in the bunker……..”? Apparently not. Speaks volumes.
I’m sure he could do that, dearie. He wrote a whole book about life in the bunker. And like Adam says, it’s not brain surgery to translate a diary:
Woke up late again, bombed Coventry, walked the dog, still snowing in Stalingrad. Nut cutlets for dinner, my favourite!
We’re stuck. He (apparently) admitted that he couldn’t read the diaries – but even if he could have read them, it doesn’t have any bearing on whether his spoken German was good enough for him to interview the Nazis without an interpreter. He wrote a book about the bunker – but as I said, it was the book my wife was encouraged to view as a model in her undergradute days, and which she now takes to be , in part at least, a fraud. It seems that we must agree to differ.
Okay, but I’m more doubtful about his German than I was earlier. Please give my thanks to Mrs Dearie for her initial skepticism, but the biography says that after 60 years The Last Days of Hitler is still the standard work on the subject. Talking of frauds, Trever-Roper himself wrote about one: I would quite like to read this.
What is a “nut cutlet” ? I can only guess it’s a particular cut of pork, not plain Schweineschnitzel with grated peanuts, say.
It’s an old-fashioned vegetarian dish that old-fashioned vegetarians used to eat before vegetarian cuisine became as delicious as it is nowadays. I don’t suppose Hitler really ate them, though. He probably lived on sauerkraut or something vegetarian from southern Germany. I bet someone has already written a book about Hitler’s favourite dishes.
“The problem that he encountered in this case was twofold: firstly, that the handwriting was so spidery and illegible, and secondly, that the diaries were written in an antiquated script, which most Germans cannot read.”
This is a sample of the fake diaries:
http://historicalmysterywriter.blogspot.com/2009/10/adolf-hitlers-diaries-fraud.html
I agree that the handwriting is not easily legible, but I can decipher some of it, it wasn’t written in an antiquated script.
Also, here’s an extract of what Brian MacArthur, former deputy editor of the Sunday Times, has to say about the matter:
“On Monday I accompanied Trevor-Roper to Hamburg, where he was attacked, notably by David Irving, the Right-wing historian, at a heated press conference. At lunch, Trevor-Roper thrust a menu at a colleague. “I can’t read old German – you’d better translate it,” he said.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/3636377/Hitler-diaries-scandal-Wed-printed-the-scoop-of-the-century-then-it-turned-to-dust.html
It seems to me like any German that wasn’t neatly typewritten was old German to Trevor-Roper.
Jeeze, what a scrawl. But it’s more legible than other handwriting I’ve seen. And it’s true, it is not an “antiquated script”.
It’s “antiquated” as a longhand Roman script only in the sense that fashions have changed. It’s not “antiquated” in the sense of “longhand Gothic”, if there is such a thing.
It doesn’t look much like Hitler’s real handwriting, either. Now I’ll have to find an example…
Last week I caught a TV documentary on the Hitler Diary Incident, including an interview with Konrad Kujau, the forger. He had even forged some of the “comparison handwriting” evidence initially presented to experts charged with evaluating the authenticity of the diaries.
I read that too.
Did you know I own a presentation copy of Mein Kampf? It was presented to me by my father, “with love”. He bought it in America for me, because I couldn’t find a copy here. He said the place was awash with them, because American soldiers had brought them back from Europe as souvenirs.
My father was convinced it was a significant historical document that I should read: “Hitler spelled out everything he intended to do, but nobody paid attention”. I have to admit it is full of chilly Gemütlichkeit and warm patriotism, but I didn’t read much of it.
That second link is useful, Bruessel.
“Trevor-Roper’s main mistake, he told Knightley, had been to sign the confidentiality agreement that Stern had thrust at him in the bank vault in Zurich. By signing, he had deprived himself of the facility that every academic cherishes – the freedom to consult his colleagues.” Aye, especially colleagues who could have read the damn things.