W.A.G. #3

Grüezi, Jungen und Mädchen! Fangen wir an! (Translation: Swiss-dialect-Hello, boys and girls! Let's begin!) I can't believe we're already at the third installment of WAG! Hold the phone - is that all? Man I've been slacking. My bad, people, my bad. Never fear, though, this week's word is so astronomically schmecktakular (from an Austrian McDonald's ad, means über delish) that it should make up for any remissness in WAGing on my part. So put on your awesome-goggles and your super-cool-apron and get ready to be taken on a wild wild ride.

This week's Word that is Awesomely German is: geschnorkelt (ahh, naked Germans, what won't you do? Tempting death by a shark mistaking your (ding)dingdong for a tasty worm is apparently NOT a dealbreaker. What a fascinating society...).

OK, so in order to really get into this, I need to spin you a tale of hilarity. In college I was a sucker for intro language classes. My motives were twofold: first, easiest easy A I could ever hope for. All you have to do is look like you're trying really hard and the teachers get all "Aww look how cute the girl! She wants learn the language German so much, but with the grammar not always so correct! We give A, no? Nice girl gets A, so sweet with not-so-good the speaking!" The second reason, which I realize now was ridiculously ungrounded in reality, was the concept that once I learned the basics of a language, I could easily become fluent by just living in the relevant country for a year or so, and therefore I should soak up as many basics as I could. However, I now realize that it's highly unlikely that I will live in France, Italy, Korea, and Germany for a year each - I mean I can't even get Asian Babies in 3/4 of those countries, what's the point?

Anyway, my last foray into intro languages was, as I've mentioned, German class. This was by far the pinnacle of my linguistic sampling, partly-to-mostly due to my discovery that when in doubt you can just make up a word and it has a 83.94% chance of being right. Take the past tense: you take a verb, add "ge" to the beginning, and presto change-o you've got a past participle! (Examples: gegessen, gefahren, gefangen, etc - this could be a WAG on its own) So, on one of our tests, our essay assignment was to write about a vacation we took recently. I was in the middle of an awesome description of our Familienferien in den Bahamas, and I was fully demonstrating my command of the past tense and all our new vocabulary words, when I realized that I wanted to talk about how I went snorkeling and we hadn't learned the word for that! So, I took a leap and wrote in "Ich habe geschnorkelt," and figured that at least I'd get my point across and maybe would get some sympathy points for being vaguely funny. However, that test was returned to me with NO mistakes marked in my essay. Setting aside the fact that I'm awesome at German, I realized that my Hail-Mary pass, based purely on the hope that German might be as ridiculous as it is in my dreams, had succeeded marvelously.

Therefore, the word "geschnorkelt" reminds me of that day when I realized that German was going to fulfill all of my wildest expectations. (Not to mention that it is a pretty funny-sounding word in general.) I rest my case.

I will leave you with this hilarity from the land of Nacktspaß (naked fun? I made that up, but as we know that doesn't mean it's wrong). What will they think of next? You'll have to wait until next WAG to find out...