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Every so often in the current press enthusiasm about free newspapers, someone says something along the lines of "But there is concern that advertisers could unduly influence editorial lines". Does anyone keep a list of this somewhere?

Searching the web for this, I was amused to see:

"€œMoradvertisers ask us to blur the lines between advertising and editorial,"€Nina Lawrence, publisher of Bride and Modern Bride, told Advertising Age.

as if wedding magazines weren't utterly and irremediably complicit in the wedding industry anyway.

Some time ago, I compared the Independent to taz. This is extremely unfair, because die tageszeitung carries practically no advertising, relying instead on personal subscriptions.

posted at: 12:24 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

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I thought I could keep separate languages apart in my head, but it took me ages to notice that the Gammel component in Gammelfleisch didn't use to be standard German, rather being familiar to me as a Scandinavian word for "old". Gammelfleisch, I assumed, was meat that was too old for human consumption.

According to de.wikipedia.org (translation mine):

"Gammel" is a Low German word, which means "old". Colloquially, according to Duden, Gammel indicates "cheap, worthless, unusable things of many sorts". Officially, the expression stands for food not fit for human consumption - the part of the catch which is used to make fish meal or fertilizer.

posted at: 19:30 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

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Yahoo's term extraction API doesn't seem to know about entities like ä.

posted at: 22:06 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

Denn ist Einmal der Kopf voran, so folget der Schweif auch

is a line from Die Vortrefflichen (The Virtuosi) by Hölderlin, which is in hexameters. All five of that set of poems (Guter Rat, Advocatus Diaboli, Die Vortrefflichen, Die beschreibende Poesie and Falsche Popularität) are.

So can you place the caesura in that line? I can't, unless I make Kopf voran a dactyl, and it is nothing of the sort, so the caesura ends up in the middle of voran. He must be using the form to reinforce his point.

posted at: 21:49 | path: /D/bread_and_wine | permanent link to this entry

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There's a huge amount of received opinion about German in the UK, and I'm yet to come across a single piece of it that's not thoroughly misleading. Take this article in The Observer, for example.

The writer claims in the first paragraph that "you can pretty much make up [English] as you go along... unlike French and German, which are made rigid from committees deciding from on high whether or not new words or spellings should be admitted to the official lexicon."

Unlike the OED, I suppose. The writer also seems to assume that whereas we, in the UK, write down words without checking whether they're in the dictionary, foreigners can't.

Looking no further than the headlines in yesterday's taz, I find Asyl im Ego-Shooter-Land, Knietief im Prollfloor and Leben in Call Center, none of which have been cleared by the Dudenredaktion or the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, or hyphenated consistently with one another.

All I can recommend is that if you're British, and about to mention German as an example of something, check first with a German or speaker of German. If you can't find either of those, use a better example.

posted at: 10:27 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

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I wonder whether the Germans who complain about Denglisch realize that, far from turning German into a dialect of English, it produces expressions that are at least misleading and often incomprehensible if you're a native English speaker.

Take the German online dating service PARSHIP. I can see what they're aiming for, but the name looks to me like a root vegetable. Goodness knows how they'll do in the UK.

posted at: 23:28 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

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This ticket is valid for up to five persons or else parents or grandparents, respectively one parent or grandparent with an unlimited number of own children under the age of 15, travelling together around the clock, 24 hours. The fare regulations and conditions of transport apply otherwise.

posted at: 18:59 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

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Not so long ago, the press was speculating about when Tony Blair would hand over to Gordon Brown. Now they're expecting him to last until the possibly anti-constitutional German elections in September, hence the interest in how well he gets on with Angela Merkel.

The case of Gordon Brown is more interesting, though. How will the dour, academic son of the manse get on with the dour, academic daughter of the manse?

posted at: 11:37 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

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I always read Ungarn as ungern, and ungern as Ungarn.

posted at: 22:02 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

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The German for banal is banal. I was expecting banell.

posted at: 22:53 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry