We’ll start with a little anecdote taken straight out of my life in order to wave goodbye to my temporarily-Viennese-American friends.

Chilling by the water in Miami beach last summer, I ran into a Hispanic family. They chatted me up by starting with something like, “Where you’re from? You can’t be American reading a book on [...]

Indifference. A term every political economics student is ranting and raving about. When an individual is indifferent about option A or B, then he/she values both equally and thus considers them as good or as bad as the other.
Meh is the more casual term for it and I wish I could have “Meh” go mainstream [...]

When you first start out in the beginner phase, you can only say things like “Ick heisse John. Ick kann sprecken Deutsch.” At this point you sound like a moron, but as your German improves to the point where you can talk about the weather, your credibility as an intelligent human sky rockets and peaks at the [...]

Leider ist die Maklersprache wissenschaftlich noch kaum erforscht. Sie dürfte sich aber doch im Euphemismus-Grad von der allgemeinen Verkäufersprache etwas abheben. Mit ein wenig Routine lassen sich Systeme erkennen: “absolute Ruhe” bezeichnet meist einen Ort, an dem einander Fuchs und Hase Gute Nacht sagen. “Lebendige Atmosphäre” in einer “aufstrebenden Gegend” könnte Stress und Baulärm bedeuten, [...]

Mobiles Internet Setup GuideT-Mobile am Mac

Dieses Wochenende kaufte meine Schwester für ihre Wohnung in Wien eines der am meisten gehypten Produkte in Österreich. Mobiles Internet boomt in keinen anderen europäischen Land und ist nirgendswo preislich erschwinglich wie in good old Austria. Da auch unsere Mobiltelefonieverträge bei T-Mobile laufen, war der Griff zum Fairclick Smart (mit [...]

Whenever an attempt to communication or action fails, people get very creative when they encounter a lack of understanding. Both German and English have a vast repertoire listing expressions of incomprehension.

Our way of communitication is totally inefficient and outdated according to Clement Gallet’sManifeste “for the extenstion of SMS slang to all the media.”
SMS slNg must B D onlE wA 2 XprS oursLvz
In this grammar book aset of rules is provided to reduce the amount of characters in any kind of communication and points out [...]

It was only a matter of time for a bilingual blog like mine to pick up a myth shrouded in legend like the one we’re looking at today. Here’s the thing: According to stories that a lot of German teachers tell their students, German lost out to English in a vote on the official language [...]