Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Ahem, an Offaly man maybe

Or the lobby as they call it in Scotland.

Have also heard people (possibly me?) pronounce it "foi-ay"

I mis-heard "Das Leben ist kein Ponyhof" as "Das Leben ist klein Ponyhof" the first time my husband said it.

i was reading a while back about german humour and why it doesn't translate well

the whole article was so funny and really helped me understand my germanic brothers

(searching for it)

i believe it was this one

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/may/23/germany.features11

sorry that wasn't it

it was this one: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170802-why-people-think-germans-arent-funny

there are several distinct German modes of humor, in my experience

one of my instructors in college was of the "Germans are serious, and when they're being funny, they act EXTRA serious" variety and I would crack up at his jokes when no one else would

from that first link to the guardian

On my first night in Hannover I had gone out drinking with some young German actors. "You will notice there are no old buildings in Hannover," one of them said. "That is because you bombed them all." At the time I found this shocking and embarrassing. Now it seems like the funniest thing you could possibly say to a nervous English visitor.

yeeeah, this is the mode my instructor was permanently wired into

Not really tickling my funny bone there tbf.

That all the different kinds of tea are really the same plant that has been processed/oxidized differently.

(in my defense I only started drinking tea regularly in the last year)

My favourite German joke, which was actually told to me while driving down the autobahn, had me asking "there are so many arrows saying Ausfahrt" and my German friend replying "yes, it's the biggest city in Germany"

lol

https://assets.boomkat.com/spree/products/253176/large/original.jpg

I've mentioned it before, but the class I mentioned had a number of farmboy types who would try to bait the instructor before class about Germany and he'd keep escalating by stating somewhat provocative things in a very matter of fact way. One day, it ended when he said, "Once the German army starts marching, they are unstoppable"

I almost fell out of my chair laughing

life is just a pony farm
can you live this pony farm life

FOI-yur

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Saturday, 3 March 2018 04:28 (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

australians do this, which tbh i thought was a legitimate pronunciation until just now

also there's an entire thread in the transliterated foreign aphorisms thing, it's brilliant

it's legit

“foie gras”

sometimes foyer pronunciation depends upon for whom i'm code switching tbh

foy-er. "aunt" = ant. robot = robutt

ok i'm still in 2008, but i've learnt more from this thread than the last year of life, thanks ilx. i still don't know who the fuck sandy shaw is but at least i get the pun.

courtney act is meant to sound like “caught in the act”, apparently everyone knew that except me

Caught in barn innit

Caught in the barn innit

may i reiterate that hawaii is a SIX HOURS away from california

Idgi how far did you think it was

it's a me, six hours away from California

idk like an hour or two? im not from california

If you said "foy-yay" instead of "foy-er" in Australia you'd get serious side-eye.

xp i thought the distance to hawaii was something like that until i had the chance to visit and discovered just how long it would take.

*to get there.

It's been a long time since i flew to the States but I thought Heathrow to JFK was ab0out 6 hours in the 70s & 80s. So the same duration does seem long for what presumably gets counted as an internal flight.
Maybe it bolsters the idea that Hawaii should be an independent state not part of the U.S. heard taht the move away from Independence wasn't 100% liked by natives.

Its probably more about the distance

Hawaii should build a wall, and send Dog The Bounty Hunter back!

Alaska is five hours from California by air. Don’t get me started on Guam.

the move away from Independence wasn't 100% liked by natives.

Understatement

The German dude who worked with us definitely had a killer deadpan, which he laid the groundwork for by being very serious the rest of the time.

Also he did the thing where having a very good sense of humour doesn't mean that you're actually funny a lot of the time - it means you hit your mark when you try, in contrast to EG one of our other colleague who would bound in like a setter in the brush in the sense that there was a joke somewhere in there, when a lot of the times the joke was just "that sounded a bit gay".

That's a great depiction of contrast, right there

Was slightly mindblown when I discovered this.

The two parts to the word “helicopter” are not “heli” and “copter”, but “helico” meaning spiral, and “pter” meaning one with wings, like pterodactyl.

— Karthik Balakrishnan (@karthikb351) March 5, 2018

Shit

a spiral with wings

beautiful

helicoter

nice - I still get weird looks from fellow biomed research people when I refer to "apo-tosis". The Aussie default is "ay-POP-tosis"

morphology ftw!

Stonehenge, the Alamo, the Amityville House... I discovered today that the railroad trestle on the Murmur album cover isn't exactly in downtown Athens, but it's not exactly out in the middle of nowhere either.

https://i.imgur.com/CIKp3b9.jpg

Granted, that area probably looks a little more populated today than it did in 1980, but still. I always imagined that you'd have to ~~ walk, through the woods ~~ to get there.

it's walking distance from the old church where they were living for a while ... that area is close to downtown, but most of what you see in the photo was undeveloped land in 1980

the trestle itself is half torn down now

When I was there in '94 it still basically looked like the cover but more kudzu. I think there was another (steel) trestle around Athens with "So Central" written on it.

I am 36 and I only learned last week that Tupac Shakur was born and raised in NYC and Baltimore, and didn’t move to Cali til he was almost done with high school. Also he was friends with Biggie up until he made Hit Em Up, which apparently he did just to sell records. It’s kind of blowing my mind to think the California Love guy was actually an East Coaster, and the whole East Coast/West Coast beef started just from dude being a shitty friend