Thursday, August 05, 2004
A friend writes:
Further digging reveals the real story to be a search for the German language’s most beautiful word, sponsored by the Sprachrat. My personal favorite word auf Deutsch has always been “Augenblick,” which doesn’t seem to have made it to the finalists’ circle at all… but then, these are the people keeping David Hasselhoff’s musical career alive, so I’m not sure they occupy any kind of real aesthetic high ground.
Comments
You made me laugh out loud in the office at the Hasselhoff crack. Bad yuki!~
Of course, the crack had to come from the country that *gave* us Hasselhoff in the first place…. :)
I agree that Augenblick should be in the final collection. Realdictionary.com mistranslates it, and loses a lot of its beauty. It’s “the blink of an eye”, not just blink.
And for Jim - the proper translation for “Homeland Security” is “Staatssicherheit” - the word that has been abbreviated as “Stasi” in Eastern Germany during the communist regime. Feel free to draw conclusions….
Augenblick is one of my favorites too!
Ear-worm is just plain creepy- if descriptive.
From high school german: Amerikanischefoosballspieler remains a marker of the old, pre-revamped, german that I learned to love.
My fave remains “bodengeschmack,” but a close second has to be “Heimatlandsicherheitsdienst.”