Archive of Linguistically Captivating

Literally

Ever since the Internet got accessible easily, an Avant Garde descended from Linguistic Heaven to educate us, the stupid common people, literally point at our linguistically weak Achilles’ heel. Ouch, doesn’t the usage of “literally” sound wrong to you? Well, if you are a representative of today’s online patrol on misusage of the English language, you probably answer the previous question with a loud, stark Y-E-S. If your answer is no, please, don’t stop reading now. You already made it this far.

There are moments in life where you feel this sudden surge of hormones (mostly adrenaline) that tell you the meaning of your existence. The chore that you are supposed to be able to tick of at the end of your life, the obligation that you fulfill with - hopefully - good grace. It seemed to me that yesterday this special moment occurred to me when I was talking to an old friend (he happens to be from Vorarlberg, servas). I was using the omnipotent, omni-pretty-much-anything phrase “Duh” and all I got was a sad, cheerless “What does it mean, man?” This post is supposed to clear up some things.

For time tends to get less busy I decided to pick up a book that I always wanted to read that has been rotting in my book shelf since my A-Levels: Apex Hides The Hurt by Colson Whitehead. I will soon publish a short review on this book, FYI (this abbreviation is for “for your information” in case you are wondering).

Anyway, I came across with the phrase in Apex Hides The Hurt. Here a quote: “That doesn’t mean I’m all up in his Kool-Aid, if you know what I mean” - And I was - talking to myself, like a 64-year-old grandpa - “No, not exactly,” so I check and did some research on that phrase. Lucky you as I made a blog post out of my curiosity. Curious Gorge Phil meets a rather short Lingo Bingo session.

A quick note on two things that somehow appeared and I couldn’t help sharing with you, lieber Reader. The attached video shows a sketch playing with letters. It’s quite self explanatory, so I am not going to elaborate on that one. English - German: 1:0.

The second thing might sound completely out of context, but speaking of a superiority of English compared to German I want to point out how stupid for example 2012 sounds in German. If you want to say the short form (that all people born before ca. 1997 remember) of 2012 you say zwanzig zwölf. Sounds stupid, huh? The English way on the other hand sounds quite elegant and natural: twenty twelve.

Too bad things like that hardly work in German. English - German: 2:0.

If you now feel bad for German, check out my entry on the tohobohu in the English language.

When the year approaches its end, several media entities try to enforce their charity programs. PHIL’s Blogging follows suit. Christmas is not just a celebration with family, no, several people take the opportunity to look around and reach out to those who can’t live in prosperity like the majority of west civilization.

Freerice.com is an organization that offers an online quiz for English vocabulary. For each word you can assign a definition or similar word, the company donates 20 grains of rice to poor people. Train your vocabulary and help to fight starvation. If you feel like that idea, try it and do something good. Tell me how many grains you “free”ed to fight poverty and hunger.Speaking of donations: Did you know that Austria donates .48 % of its income to the Official Development Aid. Here’s a list of countries, that annually donate money to developing countries. Fighting the hunger is one of the biggest issues. The cost of elimination of world wide hunger is estimated at about $195 billion a year. Only 6 countries refused to participate. Guess who that is…

Lass uns nicht um den heißen Brei reden (let’s not beat around the bush) und schon legen wir los mit Lingo Bingo (check out the Lingo Bingo archive)…

Do you find yourself clueless when it comes to “Thanksgiving”? Well, maybe this can help you out. American traditions are surprisingly present in European culture due to the fact that America has been exporting holiday traditions by various means. For example, the majority of TV series covers at least one episode about festive holidays, such as Christmas (we do not need to elaborate on that topic) or Thanksgiving. Halloween, love it or hate it, has established after all. Are Europeans going to pick up that tradition, too? Well if you ask me, I’d say: “Not gonna happen”, but read more about the typically North American tradition…

In today’s edition of Lingo Bingo, we will cover some commonly used idioms in everyday’s language. Im sogenannten Alltag lässt man es gerne mal laufen und greift auf bekannte Sprachbilder zurück. So that’s exactly what we are going to talk about. Are there certain “Floskeln” (empty phrases that are pretty hackneyed) that both the German speaking and English speaking word use repetitively?