Just a couple of weeks or so, I had an experience that was possibly sort of meaningful: I fell in love with beer all over again, in a sense. I mean have you ever noticed how cool the German term for “brewery” looks on the Beck’s pack (“brauerei”)? It sounds like some sweet Jeff Spicoli type of surfer dude saying it. I was like, I gotta learn German. That’s all there is to it.
So I got the German for Dummies (I’ve had pretty good luck with this series up to this point) and the translator dictionary, each of which was quite easy and prevalent to find at the library. The first thing that struck me was that really early on they teach you the word “bear.” It’s like uh, I usually don’t go near bears… am I going to have to interact with bears in this strange place?
I am an aspiring chef, so I’ve been learning all of the food-related things (they crazily have like 10 different words for “restaurant,” which is pretty cool), but sometimes those bookend words at the top of the page of a dictionary in any language can be noxious. The first one, one that I find badly antiquated and unacceptable (which is ironic since I just read an article on “outlaw country” from the ‘70s) is “niggardly.” I mean it’s not even overstatement at all, or an idiom of any sort, to say that you’d get your a** beat where I come from for even saying that word. It’s like wow, I didn’t know I got the Dwight Yoakam edition of this thing.
The other one, and this one might be less obvious, is “heterosexual.” I mean, por que? What is the point? Why monitor other people to the extent that we categorize their sexual behavior?
Look, I’m not going to do what you think I’m going to do here, and go on one of those rants that’s like, “Down with Western civilization, we need to completely overhaul everything about society everywhere, down the colors we paint our flower vases.” But just to point out, the categorization of sexuality has been a mechanism for persecution over the years, namely in Christian societies like Britain and inquisition-era Spain. I DON’T think that’s something with which America or any modernized society wants to be associated, yet here we are with these spiny obstacles cluttering up our contemporary dictionaries, this particular one having just been updated in 2007. 2007 is like, the future. But then, I’m old, or so I thought I was.
So I got the German for Dummies (I’ve had pretty good luck with this series up to this point) and the translator dictionary, each of which was quite easy and prevalent to find at the library. The first thing that struck me was that really early on they teach you the word “bear.” It’s like uh, I usually don’t go near bears… am I going to have to interact with bears in this strange place?
I am an aspiring chef, so I’ve been learning all of the food-related things (they crazily have like 10 different words for “restaurant,” which is pretty cool), but sometimes those bookend words at the top of the page of a dictionary in any language can be noxious. The first one, one that I find badly antiquated and unacceptable (which is ironic since I just read an article on “outlaw country” from the ‘70s) is “niggardly.” I mean it’s not even overstatement at all, or an idiom of any sort, to say that you’d get your a** beat where I come from for even saying that word. It’s like wow, I didn’t know I got the Dwight Yoakam edition of this thing.
The other one, and this one might be less obvious, is “heterosexual.” I mean, por que? What is the point? Why monitor other people to the extent that we categorize their sexual behavior?
Look, I’m not going to do what you think I’m going to do here, and go on one of those rants that’s like, “Down with Western civilization, we need to completely overhaul everything about society everywhere, down the colors we paint our flower vases.” But just to point out, the categorization of sexuality has been a mechanism for persecution over the years, namely in Christian societies like Britain and inquisition-era Spain. I DON’T think that’s something with which America or any modernized society wants to be associated, yet here we are with these spiny obstacles cluttering up our contemporary dictionaries, this particular one having just been updated in 2007. 2007 is like, the future. But then, I’m old, or so I thought I was.