Germania and the Germanians

(This post is a little old. It lay unpublished in the drafts for a while)

In almost two months amongst the Germanians, in Germania, what strikes me as most remarkable is that I still don't know a single complete sentence in Deutsch. Evidently, it's not really a language you can pick up by listening to people.
Does that mean much to me?
Well, I've reached the stage where I'm so used to people saying things I don't remotely understand, that I find it hard to notice when someone is addressing me even in English. So I would say that it does.

What's far more interesting than the Germans' Deutsch however, is their English, or Dinglish as many call it.
I understand that all Germanfolk learn English in school. At a level such that about all of them, can communicate at least in rudimentary English (except the ones who will later go on to work at travel desks, it seems). Most do better.

However, given their relative unfamiliarity with the English of regular use, the scope for unintended puns and unforeseen innuendo is boundless. This entry is about just a few such jewels.

Funnily enough, the colloquial word for "Goodbye" has "Choos" as its German equivalent. To add to this, the local Schwabish dialect has "ley" as a frequently used suffix. So in short, it was common for people to tell me to "choos ley" while parting. (In the hope that my blog may someday have an international readership, "choos ley" = suck it, in Hindi). In time I began to derive a sick sort of pleasure by responding in kind.

Take the case of the young hulk I happened to meet at the gym. I noticed he was lifting weights equal to a small truck. However he was using a lot of ten and twenty pound weights instead of a few heavier ones. Being in need of some light weights, i dragged a couple of heavier ones to where he was and asked him if he'd switch four tens each for my two forties.
Before anything else, his eyes went wide and popped outwards slightly. I wasn't alarmed. I'd seen that look before. It was the look of someone who was thrown into the world of Deutsch -English translation without warning. Regaining his composure he told me (accompanied by numerous meaningless hand gestures), "No no!! No....I'm climaxing!". Needless to say, he had no clue why I spent the next couple of minutes rolling on the floor.

This other time I wanted to put me a chair on my balcony and rest my tired workingboy legs in the fresh air. The balcony being a shared one, I casually asked the girl next door of she'd mind me putting out some furniture. Thrusting her head and neck backwards inexpleciably, she told me in a flurry of words "Because not, because not!!". A little confused, I decided it was probably best to abandon the idea altogether. Five minutes later there was a hurried knocking on my balcony door and from outside I could hear her screaming in explanation, "I mean 'of course not', not 'because not', I mean 'of course not'".

Apparently the potential for such unknown gaffes is not limited to the average German speaking person. It extends even to those who are in-charge of writing notices or printing signboards. At the laboratory where I worked, there hung a seemingly nondescript board over us all. On it were these words of profound wisdom: "Drawers may unclasp if rack is tilted". Every morning when I walked in there it took a lot on my part to resist the urge to scribble a little "Amen to that!" underneath it.
In a similar incident at the mall, an area was marked as "ränd central". No comment there really.

All in all, if you're one for language tourism, then Germany's the place to be.