Jan van Tienen writes for the ERB about European equivalents of The Onion:
Few joke-forms are so beguilingly efficient as the satirical news headline. Consider a well-wrought one: « Fetus aborted after too few likes for ultrasound ». I remember coming across this one in 2012 on Facebook (obviously) and feeling a wonderful shock. It’s a full ideological roller-coaster in under ten words. And then there’s the sub-joke — « should you saddle a child with prenatal unpopularity? » — skewering a genre (parental anxiety clickbait) that deserves to be skewered. So dark, but that’s part of the efficiency: bring the reader so quickly to the darkest place but also trust, just as quickly, that the reader will land at the ethical conclusion. […]
That joke article appeared in the Dutch platform De Speld, our version of The Onion. Pretty much every European country has an Onion — Germany’s Der Postillon (founded in 2008), France’s Le Gorafi (2012), Austria’s Die Tagespresse (2013), Ireland’s Waterford Whispers (2009), Italy’s Lercio (2012), Spain’s El Mundo Today (2009) — indeed somehow has to have an Onion. They feel almost like public utilities, which is to say that they’ve come to be taken for granted. Satirical news is as old as real news, to be sure, but it has taken a particular form in our time. The Onion started as a satirical print newspaper in 1988 in Madison, Wisconsin, and has served as a blueprint for satirical news media around the world. « The Dutch version of The Onion » rings a bell in a way that « The German version of Private Eye » would not. […]
The reverse also happens, when some portion of the population falls for it, taking an article in De Speld as real. Even though fooling readers is never the intention, such stories can, alas, boost such a publication’s success, and can help entrench a satirical newspaper’s position in the firmament. In 2009, the Netherlands’ largest newspaper, De Telegraaf, took a report from De Speld as actual news. There’s a Dutch snack called « patatje oorlog » (war fries), which is fries with mayonnaise, satay sauce and raw onions. De Speld’s joke was about a restaurant in Zeeland that had had introduced a « Patatje Holocaust », and De Telegraaf reported on the fuss. (Today it boggles the mind that the joke was even published, but hey, more innocent times?) In 2011, another real paper, the Haarlems Dagblad, reported earnestly on a joke from De Speld (« 200 kilos of tuna found in cargo of cocaine »), turning it — spuriously! — into news.
Austria’s Die Tagespresse started in 2013, a bit later than the others, but it achieved virality after only two weeks with an article about Edward Snowden seeking asylum in Austria to avoid deportation to the US. (Austria, apparently, is notorious for its slow-moving asylum procedures.) The joke went so viral that the Austrian Foreign Ministry announced that Snowden had not in fact landed in Austria, that it was a satirical post, not real.
There’s plenty of amusing stuff there (I particularly liked Postillion’s « Discovery of bones reveals: first humans lived horizontally underground » [Knochenfund belegt: Frühe Menschen lebten waagerecht unter der Erde]); if this is the sort of thing you like, click on through. (Via chavenet’s MeFi post.)
You know what they say about Onions, everyone has one.
Preferably tied to their belt.
To the list of European Onion equivalents can be added Romania’s: Times New Roman.
The Onion has been even more efficient than that: even over two decades since I first saw it, the headline (without any actual article following) “Hamburger Helped” still makes me laugh out loud.
Part of what made The Onion great is that they often write the heds first, then see if they can come up with sufficiently funny articles to go under them. If they can’t, they just run the headlines on their own.
Oh yes. Oh fuck yes.
The name is great, but 873 “partners” who want to place cookies must be a record. I don’t think I’ve seen even 300 anywhere else.
A friend of mine who is from the US loves that he can travel around the EU now. It did not occur to me. (he is a Bulgarian resident).
The cruel but funny “Head Deadhead Dead” stuck with me (that was about Jerry Garcia.)
I didn’t know that was from the Onion. (It kinda writes itself …)
I keep trying not to like the Grateful Dead, but I keep on failing. It’s so embarrassing. Perhaps I should just embrace it now.
To connect to someone mentioned in another thread, here’s Bobby Weir a few years ago telling the story about the night in April 1984 when the Grateful Dead and the pseudo-Clash* were staying at the same hotel in Philadelphia after playing concurrent gigs at different venues in town and he ended up staying up all night drinking with the not-yet-late Joe Strummer. Working out the context with the aid of the internet, this was a couple nights before the first time I myself saw the Dead at their next stop on that particular tour, but they had a day off between cities so Bobby could recuperate. Joe initially charmed Bobby by asking him questions about Pigpen, who was eleven years dead at that point, so David E. can keep that in mind if he ever needs to make small talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5xOLstEvcM
*Mick Jones was gone, and the band was a ghost, adrift and trading on its prior brand value for a year or two before hanging it up.
I keep trying not to like the Grateful Dead, but I keep on failing.
Aw, there’s no need for that! Their fans can be annoying, but I always found the Dead likable and often more than that. “Uncle John’s Band” is one of my all-time favorites.
Are we on the verge of a Big Reveal wherein we learn that the younger David Eddyshaw was one of the mud-covered hippies in attendance at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bickershaw_Festival?
I’d rather make fun of them than listen to them.
I’d rather make fun of them than listen to them.
Are Grateful Dead one of those you-had-to-be-there bands? The oceans of mud; the sleep deprivation. I’ve kinda been always aware of them without specifically listening to any of their stuff. (Or if I did listen, it went in one ear and out the other.)
Perhaps the jamming was the thing, and doesn’t come across in the recordings?
There was a big Dead concert every year at the University of Oregon. My friend Ian, who was about seventeen, had to drive to the campus in Eugene for something else during the weekend of festivities. His description of the of the mess in the parking lot where the Deadheads were camped out was: “They were running around barefoot in stuff I wouldn’t walk on wearing shoes!”
The next year was when Jerry Garcia died, and there was a lot of moaning from fans that the annual concert was not going to happen. My father suggested that, as they were “the Dead,” there shouldn’t have been any problem just having Garcia’s coffin on stage with the rest of the band. I objected that would probably be some kind of health code violation—but Dad pointed out that nobody had ever seemed to care about health and sanitation at the concert before, so why should they start now?
The Onion‘s finest may be “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” which they of course get to run regularly.
I myself went no further than the Boston Garden and Providence Civic Center to hear the Dead, but my wife actually traveled to see them.
Another good meetup was when Miles Davis opened for the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore West in 1970. Miles wasn’t sure what to make of deadheads and the Dead themselves were actually a bit intimidated to go on after what he played. Separate not great recordings of each are available, I think.
My most favorite Onion headline is Report: Our High Schools May Not Adequately Prepare Dropouts For Unemployment
There is also Russian-Israeli parody-news mostly-headlines paper Beseder? (with subtitle: for those who can still laugh). There are other types of humorous fragments as well, but fake articles/headlines are the main dish.
I will always have positive memories of the post Mick Jones Clash, only because we went to see them play in Hannover NH in summer of ‘84 and I got to hang out with Joe Strummer after the show. That version of the Clash was at least more accessible to fans. Joe did a great job feigning interest in our punk rock band and encouraging us. Maybe it was his “middle class education” but the man could be a real gentleman.
I forgot last night:
Lots of Postillon readers make the same mistake 🙂
The word/spelling Postillon is a Nebenform unfamiliar to me. But it’s the name of the site. The Austrians do as they please, as does everyone else. It’s only natural that not everyone is best pleased with this state of affairs.
I am glad to hear that the Jonesless Mr. Strummer was gentlemanly toward teenage Vanya and his bandmates, and only mildly disappointed that Famous New Hampshirite GG Allin does not make a cameo appearance in the story.
@AntC: the actual studio recordings have been an ever-decreasing percentage of the commercially available material over the decades as increasingly massive amounts of archival live recordings have been “officially” released. And as early as ’71 and ’72, they were debuting new songs on live recordings and there’s a full album’s worth of original songs from that era that they never even bothered to do a studio version of because they already sort of understood that that wasn’t their forte. For some seasonal background music, you can check out this link for video of a crackling Yule log accompanied by a repeating loop of maybe eight hours of audio constituting the entirety of three consecutive shows from June 1977. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8We4tAn_tV0
On the other hand, I like the studio recordings of the more pop stuff (“Uncle John’s Band”, “Box of Rain”, not “Blues for Allah”) and have a hard time listening to the jams. Don’t murder me!
I’m with Jerry on that. I’m no Deadhead, just an appreciative outsider.
Cruel yet funny #2, The Onion yesterday had “48-Year-Old Rabbit Finally Finishes The Job” with a picture of the late, lamented Jimmy Carter. Obscure if you don’t know the back story.
What IS a hamburger helper? What kind of help does it need?
“The packaged pasta brand “Hamburger Helper” was introduced by General Mills in 1971 in response to a meat shortage and rising meat prices.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger_Helper
If it’s helping mince that makes *slightly* more sense – I was imagining an actual hamburger.
It still feels a bit back to front to me, though – I’m sure a similar product here would be advertised as Such and Such, just add mince.
@Jen in Edinburgh: There are many similar products in North America. Hamburger Helper is just particularly famous because it has a catchy name and a memorable mascot. (I knew at least one person who had nightmares about that hand when she was little.)
It’s well known that The Onion fails to strike many non-native English speakers as funny, either because they don’t even get the references, or they do get the references but humour is culturally dependent so it still isn’t funny. In the case of “Hamburger Helped”, I did wonder if the joke even traveled to native English speakers outside the USA and Canada, since I wasn’t sure if the product were sold in the UK etc.
Around the same time that The Onion ran that headline, Hamburger Helper and its talking-glove mascot appeared in a cutaway gag on the cartoon Family Guy. While Family Guy was widely watched by people in Europe, presumably few of them were familiar with this product, just like scores of other products mentioned there. I guess it somehow still works as purely absurdist humor? Or perhaps the power of the American media juggernaut is so strong that the world still watches even if they don’t get it.
only mildly disappointed that Famous New Hampshirite GG Allin does not make a cameo appearance in the story.
We played on the same bill as GG Allin at a club in Manchester that same summer as part of a multi band punk showcase when he was still calling his band “the scumfucs”. I remember being impressed by an energetic performance of “Drink, Fight and Fuck” but never became a huge fan. This was well before he started defecating on stage and went on to become a nationally infamous talk show guest. The most outrageous part of the show in ’84 was still just the profanity, and, I’m fairly sure, a lot of mutual spitting back and forth between him and the audience. It was clear even then though that GG was committed to the outsider lifestyle to a far greater degree than any of the other people in that club.
Jen in Edinburgh said:
“If it’s helping mince that makes *slightly* more sense – I was imagining an actual hamburger.”
In my experience ground beef is often/sometimes called hamburger meat in the U.S. but this might be a regional thing or even a generational thing. People, at least in California, don’t really use “mince” for ground meat.
Edited to add:
It still feels a bit back to front to me, though – I’m sure a similar product here would be advertised as Such and Such, just add mince.
Ground beef is kind of a staple item over here though, something relatively cheap that people are likely to have in their fridges and freezers and that people with kids or on a budget will want to stretch somehow. It makes sense to advertise it as a “solution” to people’s hamburger problems.
I daresay that’s true of the USA in general for at least younger generations. Before I left the USA, I knew “mince” only in the stock phrase popular in cartoons “I’m going to make mincemeat of you” = “I’m going to beat you up”, but I suspect that most American children don’t even know what that word means, that refers to the same thing as ‘ground beef/hamburger meat’.
Yeah, to me it’s entirely foreign, like “bonnet” and “lorry.”
I was taught minced meat (BrE) : ground meat (AmE) along with bonnet : hood and lorry : truck at : in school.
@JWB a repeating loop of maybe eight hours of audio
Thanks, but if you didn’t get my drift before, that would amount to about 7.5 hours of tedium [**]. Perhaps the Dead were innovative in their day but then everyone copied them so that to my never-was-there ears they’re merely pedestrian?
[**] When I was sampling yesterday, a few minutes of each track was more than enough. Contrast that Cream also only had a few genuinely original ideas, but were superb jammers (jazz background, of course) and had the decency to just stop after a few years. Always leave the punters wanting more.
Ground meat makes sense to me, although it’s not a word I would use, but hamburger is just a round thing for putting on a roll. (Or a bap or a butty or a cob or whatever you would call that!)
Compare 50 Ways of Hearing “Marquee Moon,” which presents a six-and-a-half-hour super-mix of Tom Verlaine guitar solos from performances (mostly bootleg) of Television’s classic song. I’m a fan of Television and I love the song, but there’s only so much I can take at one time.
A hamburger (count noun) is a round (rarely square) patty on a bun, but hamburger (mass noun) is ground beef (though I’d normally just say “ground beef”).
“Mince” is also foreign to me (Southern Mid-Atlantic American born in 1960s), and I wasn’t even certain it was the same thing, since it’s usually defined as chopped, not ground.
viz blitzstein translating (elisabeth hauptmann writing as) brecht:
“we’ll chop ’em to bits because we like our hamburger raw”
which to my u.s.ian ear is much better (and far more menacing) than manheim & willett’s idiom-mangling
“they quick as winking chop them into beefsteak tartare”
both chop rather than grind, but i think that has to do with an active/passive division in describing military action, where a state’s soldiers’ own actions are chopping or cutting (whether directed at an individual enemy or an enemy’s defensive line), while grinding is something that is done to them (whether they’re being “ground down” by the enemy or being “fed into the meatgrinder” by their leaders).
i’m obviously leaving out the question of whether a translator should, as manheim & willett do, retain a phrase from the target language that was inserted for effect into the original text. i think it’s usually foolish, but here is barely worth mentioning given the rest of what i don’t like about their rendering. (also, is “beefsteak tartare” in use in britain? i think i’ve only ever met “steak tartare” on this side of the pond, so it’s always felt like brechtian pseudo-english to me.)
I don’t wanna be too critical of the magnificent eccentricities of others, but stitching together a “supercut” of “Marquee Moon” in which you’ve chopped or ground or minced various live performances to extract fifty Verlaine solos but zero Lloyd solos suggests a certain … lack of balance. And perhaps a fundamental misunderstanding of the band. In any event, largely because Television was so much shorter-lived a band than the Dead they didn’t have nearly as extensive a repertoire to work with and select from. You can have eight hours of consecutively-recorded Dead (from successive nights) without necessarily repeating a single song.* If you stitch together material from the extant Television bootlegs I think it would be a challenge to get much past let’s say 2.5 hours w/o repeating a title. (I’m talking the bootlegs from the classic or “vintage” era – when they briefly reunited in the early Nineties, which was the first time I saw them, they had newly-composed material but I also think did not rehearse/resurrect the entirety of the old Seventies repertoire as opposed to selected highlights.)
*There are, of course, composition-specific “supercuts” of specific numbers. If you for some reason want to hear every single performance of “Dark Star” from calendar 1972 spliced together w/o being interrupted by anything else (reportedly about ten hours’ worth of aggregate audio) it’s definitely Out There on the internet.
a certain … lack of balance
So a cassette of John Hiseman drum solos variously from gigs with Paraphernalia, United Jazz Rock Ensemble and other bands — signed by the man in person, mark you, at a Barbara Thompson gig — suggests a devotee tipped well over the edge?
Goof grief that Marquee Moon is painful! I suppose it wouldn’t be the mode to get your guitar in tune before you started. I had a similar reaction at some up-and-coming punk band gig at varsity.
Finger verbrannt: Engländer hatte einen im Tee
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Had to look it up: einen im Tee haben ‘(idiomatic) to be tipsy.’
Herkunft: vermutlich aus der norddeutschen Sitte, Tee mit Rum zu trinken.
I wouldn’t have understood it either.
Edit: einen Fetzen haben means to have received a 5 ( = F) in school. I’ve never heard it used for being drunk (Viennese an-, zu- or niedergesoffen in this order).
I’ve never heard it used for being drunk
I’ve never heard it at all; a lot of these idioms are regional.
i have no particular opinions about jon hiseman (aside from wishing anyone “instrumental in the success” [per Discogs] of anything done by the recently be-gartered baron andrew of Cats had simply chosen to do something else), but – call me unhinged if you wish – i would absolutely be down for longform cassettes of classic metal drummers’ solos, ideally ordered by tempo and seamlessly segued. and i’d probably enjoy a gene krupa version, too, though doing that to most jazz drummers would be an abomination in my book.
I see that the Russian version of the Onion hadn’t been mentioned here yet; it’s called Panorama.
(I checked the linked article, and it talks about the Romanian and Bulgarian Onion-equivalents at length, but doesn’t mention the Russian one at any point. Not European enough, I’m guessing.)
I was taught minced meat (BrE) : ground meat (AmE) along with bonnet : hood and lorry : truck at : in school.
…TIL that minced meat and ground meat are supposed to be the same thing; I always assumed that “ground meat” (Russian фарш – apparently somehow cognate to “farce”, ironically enough given the topic of this thread) is what comes out of a meat-grinding machine (Russian мясорубка “meat-chopper”), while “minced meat” (which I would have called рубленое мясо in Russian) is meat that had been chopped by hand. The difference in texture is usually fairly recognizable.
(Google suggests that it’s not just me.)
Not sure what a “bonnet” (which is equated to a hood) is supposed to be either – is this about the clothing part, or (e.g.) a car part? In The Hunting of the Snark, one of the characters is described as a “maker of Bonnets and Hoods”, which are consequently presumably intended to be different things.
On a seasonal note, proper “mincemeat” contains no meat at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincemeat
Can’t abide the stuff myself. Bah, humbug!
@January First-of-May:
A US hood = UK bonnet is indeed a car part: the lid covering the engine of a front-engined car. I’m not sure about rear-engined vehicles. My own impression is that the hood/bonnet remains the one at the front even though it gives access to a US trunk = UK boot instead of an engine compartment. But native speakers and car enthusiasts will know best.
Headgear terminology is even more baffling, but I’ve never heard of an item of clothing distinctively known in the US as a hood and the UK as a bonnet.
Happy New Year to all of us in 2025 already, and to everyone else when they get here!
I’m not sure about rear-engined vehicles. My own impression is that the hood/bonnet remains the one at the front even though it gives access to a US trunk = UK boot instead of an engine compartment.
I would not be surprised to learn that other Americans have different uses, but, for me, a classic VW has two hoods: one in front over the trunk and one in back over the engine.
proper “mincemeat” contains no meat at all.
…
Can’t abide the stuff myself. Bah, humbug!
But what do you put in your Christmas mince pies [**]/tarts? — which are surely an essential excuse for the main purpose viz Wensleydale Cheese. (I suppose you could eat the cheese and surreptitiously slide the tart back on to the platter.)
[**] In NZ other than at Christmas, ‘mince pie’ means unambiguously pie filled with the meat variety of mincemeat. Or even at Christmas, a ‘pie shop’ would not sell a ‘mince pie’ in any non-meat sense. For classification purposes, cheese counts as meat, and therefore as a filling. Today in the shops/cafes, offerings are meagre: I turned down the cheese’n’pineapple toastie, no doubt to get toasted in a jaffle-alike.
rear-engined vehicles
Modern electric vehicles seem to be devoid of any human-detectable engine/it’s hidden underneath somehow. So they have both a front and a rear lid to put your Christmas shopping. Took me aback quite a bit when I first observed a car with both lids up.
(Whether or not I count as an eco-warrior, I’ve yet to find an electric car able to pull my boat up the launch ramp/indeed even with a tow ball, or 4WD to hack along shingle roads to the start of tramping tracks.)
…
…An eldritch abomination that meat wouldn’t improve.
@AntC:
I was taught that electric vehicles have no engine at all because they have motors instead, though I see an obvious risk of hypercorrection because Romance languages (at least those I know) have a single word, more or less identical to motor, covering internal-combustion engines too.
I’m surprised to learn that EVs fail at towing in particular, because I’ve read claims that electric motors are theoretically better suited at it, and trains seem to bear that out. Maybe range suffers too much if the electricity comes from batteries, unlike with trains? Anyway, an electric Hummer has a rated towing capacity of 12,000 lbs.
Russian фарш – apparently somehow cognate to “farce”, ironically enough given the topic of this thread
Farce can mean “forcemeat” (a mixture of chopped meat and fat used for stuffing—something I don’t think I’ve ever encountered). According to Wiktionary, “The theatre sense alludes to the pleasant and varied character of certain stuffed food items.”
Edit: And of course it’s been discussed here.
Back when I was doing retro recipes, forcemeat came up now and then. There was at least one recipe that was based around mincemeat too. I love mince pies, but there has to be at least some beef in them for them to taste right.
I was taught that electric vehicles have no engine at all because they have motors instead
That’s what I teach my students as science and engineering terminology: engines get their energy from heat, and motors get their energy from electricity or occasionally other sources, such as compressed air. But I point out that that’s not legal terminology, since in New Mexico all cars are regulated by the Motor Vehicle Division.
Offhand, motor is a little old fashioned for ICEs, but it doesn’t quite feel wrong to me. Beside fixed expressions (“motor vehicle”, “motorist”), it wouldn’t be that weird to ask a mechanic to “check the motor”, would it? With compressed air, I think I would lean toward motor rather than engine. And a train has an engine, no matter what its source of power.
i (u.s.ian) can imagine a rear-engine car’s back lid being called the “engine hood”, but without clarification, the “hood” to me is always at the front of the car. i don’t have a specific term for the back lid of a car – “pop the trunk” is the usual request for it to be opened, parallel to (less frequent) “pop the hood”, but the “trunk” is the space under the lid, not the lid itself.
and when it comes to headwear, aside from differences in shape, to me a “hood” is almost always attached to a garment (cape, coat, sweatshirt, goth-y halter top…), while a “bonnet” is a separate item.
For me I think a bonnet is always a woman’s garment, and old-fashioned, but maybe I’m forgetting some context for it.
Scottish Highlanders have bonnets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balmoral_bonnet
Some electrical vehicles still have the motor under the front hood; my current company car is a VW ID 3, where the motor and battery are where one would look for them. But this may be one of the examples where traditional German car manufacturers are still behind in the transition from combustion to electrical vehicles.
UK policemen have bonnets too (traditionally purloined on Boat Race nights as a manifestation of youthful high spirits.)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hampshire_helmet_constable.jpg#mw-jump-to-license
I think the reason that the Russian equivalent wasn’t listed is that the scope of the article was limited to EU countries.
There’s no clear Norwegian equivalent to the Onion, but there have been many efforts at news-form satire, some of them great. The daily newspaper Verdens Gang (VG) ran a satirical site called Vredens Gnag for a few years. The national broadcaster NRK had 5080 Nyhetskanalen.
In Norwegian, the lid in front end of a car is panseret (but may in the instruction manual be called motorlokket). The opening in the back end of the car is called bakluka if it opens into the main compartment, bagasjelokket on a model with a separate luggage compartment. I’m not sure what we called them on my father’s VW Beetle in the early seventies – maybe bagasjelokket (front) and motorlokket (back).
An electrical engine is an elektromotor as opposed to e.g. a forbrenningsmotor “combustion engine” or a dampmotor “steam engine”. If anything, I thought the difference in English was pondian.
I don’t think there’s a clear difference that’s accepted by a preponderance of the population; those of us who aren’t engineers or mechanics have a very poor grasp of whatever difference there is between the two words and use them according to habitual collocations.
A good example of such a habitual collocation is that if pretty much the same sort of gasoline-powered internal-combustion “engine” that powers your car is instead attached (in an assembly also containing a propeller) to the back of your smallish boat, it’s much more likely (per the google ngram viewer) to be called an “outboard motor” than an “outboard engine.” “Motorcar” for an automobile with an internal-combustion engine strikes me as a British thing and maybe semi-archaic over there, but I haven’t surveyed corpus evidence to confirm that.
Fix Your Volkswagen (1973), like rozele suggests, uses “engine hood” or ”rear hood,” as distinct from “front hood,” which is not qualified a few times.
The truly authoritative source is John Muir’s How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive (here), which was (and maybe is) the essential reference for anyone who ever worked on an air-cooled VW. It uses mostly hood, but also trunk lid, for the rear engine compartment. I didn’t find a reference for the lid of the (front) luggage compartment.
Before the Tagespresse, Austria had a site that specifically parodied the country’s largest and worst newspaper, a right-wing tabloid read by half the population (as of 30 years ago at least), the Kronen Zeitung* found at krone.at. The parody was diekrone.at until the original sued; the parody then claimed to have been bought by a Chinese investor and moved to dieklone.at. There it snarked happily ever after until the single guy who wrote all of it got too busy.
The Tagespresse keeps getting sued by the FPÖ, BTW, and keeps winning.
* The space is preorthographic. The name is from its original price.
No “engine” in German, just Motor: Elektromotor, Verbrennungsmotor, Dieselmotor, Benzinmotor. Covered by the Motorhaube, where Haube is pretty much “bonnet” literally, but also most of these things. The trunk/boot simply has a lid (Deckel), possibly calqued in the authoritative source.
O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,
die Oma sitzt im Kofferraum!
Der Opa haut den Deckel zu,
die Oma schreit: “Du blöde Kuh!”
O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,
die Oma sitzt im Kofferraum.
Grandma’s sitting in the trunk, Grandpa slams the lid shut, Grandma screams “you dumb-ass cow” (“stupid” doesn’t quite feel strong enough here). As you do. It sounds slightly better in dialect, but the rhymes and the syllable counts aren’t affected.
@Hat: I agree that a lot of people wouldn’t be able to state the technical difference between an engine and a motor, and wouldn’t be interested in any claims that referring to the motor of a gasoline-powered car is wrong. I’m certainly not claiming that for ordinary speech.
However, I doubt that you and most of the rest of the population don’t know the difference between something you plug in or put a battery into and something you put fuel into. And I doubt you’d refer to the engine of an electric fan or dryer or vacuum cleaner.
The ngram result for “the motor running” and “the engine running” has more of a recent preference for “engine” than I expected. Here’s a pondian comparison. Not much overall difference, and I can’t explain why the American ratio was so much more variable from 1910 to 1960 and the British ratio was so much more variable from 1980 to 2005.
And I doubt you’d refer to the engine of an electric fan or dryer or vacuum cleaner.
That’s what I mean about collocations.
On the topic of satirical newspapers, there’s a venerable Swedish monthly Grönköpings Veckoblad, that has been around in various guises for over a century. They recently had an article about the postal service. They were introducing a new service where if you deliver the letter yourself, you only have to pay half the postage.
Of interest to Hatters, they also introduced the world language Transpiranto, and have translated poems and songs into this pseudo-language, which is a mixture of modern European languages, Swedish slang and some stock latin phrases.
Lovely language, Transpiranto; here’s a poem by Leïf-Günthro Norrtajfun’:
Oh, I love that!
I remember reading about Grönköpings Veckoblad as inspired by the immortal Norwegian newspaper parody Trangviksposten (1899-1929), but I didn’t know it was still going! Trangviksposten didn’t survive its founder, Jacob Hilditsch.
And I doubt you’d refer to the engine of an electric fan or dryer or vacuum cleaner.
That’s what I mean about collocations.
OK, I think of “collocation” as referring to words, not things. I’m suggesting that you’d say “motor” rather than engine even if you didn’t use a word like “fan”.
“What’s wrong with this piece of shit?”
“I think the motor’s broken.”
Even if you were confronted with a device you didn’t know the word for, if it obviously had an electric thing that spun around, I’m suggesting you’d say “motor”, not “engine”.
Or wouldn’t you?
Was the Soviet Krokodil anything like The Onion?
Nope, it would probably be random. I associate the words with different lexical environments; the actual mechanics mean nothing to me.
But there seems to be an asymmetric pattern in the “non-technical” variation, where the thingies that Jerry Friedman wants to call “engines” are not infrequently called “motors” but the things he wants to call “motors” are very rarely called “engines.”
Was the Soviet Krokodil anything like The Onion?
Good heavens, no — such a publication could never have been allowed in the USSR. It was an illustrated humor magazine with only the most toothless humor. (Not saying all the jokes were bad — there was some funny stuff — but nothing that could possibly cause offense, which is a fatal condition for real humor.)
Obviously, but I wonder if they used the fake-newspaper motif at all.
(WP tells me that there were some 20 franchises in regional languages as well, from Udmurt to Tajik to Lithuanian.)
Not that I recall, but I wasn’t a regular reader.
One wonders if there were multi-lingual Soviet-era connoisseurs who would have strong opinions re how the Udmurt one was reliably funnier than the other editions whereas the Moldavian one was inexplicably but consistently lamer than average.
I had a fairly large book of translated cartoons from Krokodil. Many of them were inane or corny, but there were some that had a kind of dark Charles Addams wit.
I associate the words with different lexical environments; the actual mechanics mean nothing to me.
Thanks, I’m taking your word for it, despite the asymmetry that J.W. and I are talking about.
Was the Soviet Krokodil anything like The Onion?
There was a somewhat more upscale 16th page of Literaturnaya Gazeta (“Literaturka” in common speech) officially known as “Twelve Chairs Club” (google). It was a general purpose humor section for the weekly and it did include a fake news rubric named “Roga i Kopyta” (“Horns and hooves”, don’t google). I have no personal memories about what sort of news they parodied, but here’s one example that I took from Wiki
Arkady Arkanov … published a short story in “Horns and hooves” about a Soviet female athlete who had set a new world record in the 800-meter race in Italy. Positive emotional state contributed to her success, shortly before the start she was informed that she had a daughter born in Izhevsk.
One wonders if there were multi-lingual Soviet-era connoisseurs who would have strong opinions re how the Udmurt one was reliably funnier than the other editions whereas the Moldavian one was inexplicably but consistently lamer than average.
Probably not. Maybe one weird eccentric in a linguistics department in Novosibirsk. I always found it interesting how little interest anyone in the Soviet Union took in other „minority languages“. Kazakhs in Kazakhstan learned Kazakh, no one in Georgia or Estonia would have ever bothered, and vice versa. Certainly there were people produced from mixed marriages who could speak , say, some Tatar and some Armenian but not many, and it was not easy to find written materials in a minority language outside your region, maybe in Moscow. Certainly in traditional multi ethnic regions it was common for people to speak, say, both Uzbek and Tajik, or Kazakh and Kyrgyz, but those people would never voluntarily learn Lithuanian or Chechen. People who liked foreign languages learned „foreign“ languages – English, German, Japanese, etc.
The EU seems to be moving in the same direction – more and more people are content to use English as the language of inter cultural communication and see no need to learn other local languages. The number of Germans who can speak fluent French, for example, is dropping rapidly. I have never met a Romanian who can speak Polish, or vice versa.
On top of that, English is becoming the informal federal language of both Belgium and Switzerland.
@Vanya: I’m not sure whether that pattern should actually be surprising. In France do Breton-speakers tend to learn Basque or vice versa, either out of general interest or a sense of political solidarity against the dominant language? Same question for Basque-speakers learning Catalan or vice versa in Spain, etc. In the U.K. where all the traditional regional-minority languages are Celtic, it might be different because the languages and associated cultures form more of a natural-seeming set.
You would think a Romanian fluent in Polish or vice versa could get steady employment in Brussels in the EU bureaucracy, but of course it’s not much of a secret that the purported commitment of the EU to function in 24 official languages does not mean they have the capability to do direct translation between any of the extremely numerous potential pairs as opposed to typically routing through an intermediate translation of the source language into an intermediary conduit such as e.g. English and then from that into the target language. Even so you’d think there would be some weirdos who would aspire to be That Guy who can translate directly between Finnish and Maltese, or what have you.
Way back in ’82 when I spent the summer in West Germany as an exchange student, I had difficulty improving my conversational skills via interaction with local teenagers,* because their English was much better than my German, so they usually wanted to speak the more efficient way plus get to practice their English with a native speaker. I probably had some of the more productive, if slow and halting, conversations, with a French girl who knew no English in our mutual school-learned L2 German. I sort of replicated this experience just this past year when I had a slow-but-functional mutual-L2-German interaction with a young lady employed by a cell-phone store in Lugano, an L1 Italophone who had learned German but not English in her schooling (and was to be fair employed in a location where Anglophone tourists would not be a significant percentage of walk-in customers).
*Maybe English fluency was not yet universal among West German teens, but the ones I met were via the teenage boys in my host family and those boys both went to the Gymnasium and thus had a set of friends who did the same, so I was less likely to meet those whose schooling had placed less emphasis on foreign languages.
As a Romania resident married to a Pole, I have, often and in both directions, though rarely was the language learned out of pure linguistic interest. Both Romania and Poland have big centers for multinational companies that bring Poles to Romania and Romanians to Poland. Eventually people learn the local language. In Warsaw you can meet such Polish-knowing Romanians through the active Romanian cultural scene, but of course otherwise they are not so visible amid the huge population. In Cluj, on the other hand, Poles have been one of the most easily encountered foreign populations in shops and cafes.
“It’s not much of a secret that the purported commitment of the EU to function in 24 official languages does not mean they have the capability to do direct translation between any of the extremely numerous potential pairs as opposed to typically routing through an intermediate translation of the source language into an intermediary conduit such as e.g. English and then from that into the target language.”
The same is true of Google Translate: if you want to translate a text from non-English language A into non-English language B, GT first translates your text in language A into English and then translates its English translation into language B.
In the U.K. where all the traditional regional-minority languages are Celtic, it might be different because the languages and associated cultures form more of a natural-seeming set
I think this is true for academic linguists (e.g. the series published by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which include lots of Welsh stuff), but there doesn’t seem to be much interest among ordinary Welsh speakers in learning Scottish Gaelic or Irish. (I’m sure there must be some. But in purely practical terms, what would be the point?)
And, to be honest, I don’t think knowing Welsh really helps much with Gaelic. Things like initial mutations and conjugated prepositions perhaps don’t seem as outlandish, but that doesn’t get you all that far in practice. And it really doesn’t help you to recognise vocabulary much, even to the degree that English helps with German.
The only grammar of “real” (as opposed to revived) Cornish that I know of is in fact in Welsh, Henry Lewis’ Llawlyfr Cernyweg Canol, but it’s getting on for a century old now and firmly in the academic mould. (There have been quite a lot of papers on specific issues, of course, but it’s the only one I know of that aspires to be a manual for the whole language. Unfortunately Lewis’ work is very short, and particularly skimpy on syntax, as was then pretty usual.)
Richards’ Llawlyfr Hen Wyddeleg is of a similar vintage, and again aimed at academics, obviously (though it is quite a nice short introduction to Old Irish.)
Christopher: In Cluj, on the other hand,
… there are peaches.
You are now at an important place in Hattic history!
Germans in Siebenbürgen, the armistice of Padua, Dacia Porolissensis, a manaical and corrupt barf-bag named Gheorghe Funar, the Klausenburger Hasidim of Brooklyn, putative Illyro-Thracian substrates, Sesut, Crimean Goths, Zipsers, Flemings, Armenians (complete with jokes), and Székelys, Székelys, Székelys!
Goodness, that was almost exactly twenty years ago. And I see Gheorghe Funar claims that the theory of relativity was developed by the Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu and subsequently stolen by Albert Einstein (described by Funar as a “retarded individual”).
While there have apparently been a steady supply of edits/revisions to the wiki article on Funar as recently as last year, it doesn’t actually contain any clearly-dated info on what he’s been up to since finishing 9th in the 2014 presidential election, although the Eminescu/relativity claim is footnoted to a 2016 source so maybe he had just advanced that theory then? But for such a colorful fellow he seems by implication to have gone rather quiet in more recent years. Romania has to be sure thrown up plenty of new-to-the-scene colorful political figures since then, but the nigh-infinite capacity of wikipedia should mean you don’t have to pick and choose.
Okay okay, actually the Romanian version of the story has a brief note that he was trying to run for the Senate again in the most recent election although no indication he actually won a seat. Also the details that he claims that Elena Ceaucescu was a Jew, although Nicolae was not and neither was Jesus Christ. (According to him, the latter was a Dacian, of course.)
Christopher: Yes, and an obvious example of a Pole who knows some Romanian for cultural reasons is Andrzej Stasiuk, the excellent travel writer. Bucharest has nowhere near the Polish presence that you describe in Cluj, maybe because less tech industry and just more of every other kind of foreigner. Or maybe I am going to the wrong cafes. In any case there’s certainly more cultural cross fertilization than I recall being between Uzbekistan and Lithuania.
It’s not just the tech industry, though of course tech jobs are the most glamorous in Cluj. Some of the major multinational employers in Cluj that have attracted Poles are clerical outsourcing jobs (sometimes little more than glorified data entry) and call centers.
Supposedly bonnets are making a comeback:
Keith: Supposedly bonnets are making a comeback:
Not handmade, but it’s got tails.
for a fully snooded look.
Western Civilization is savéd!
balabonnet
Uh, scratch that.
Die Tagespresse also sometimes engages in actual investigative journalism: 1, 2 (both in very snarky German, both in open access unlike the rest of the site).
Wow, that TikTok experiment is great (and depressing).
Danke, Jörg…!!!
As consolation I offer the facts that Russia tried to use Telegram as a propaganda conduit in Ukraine and that that worked much less well than using it for espionage…
Danke, Jörg…!!!
But, but … he’s dead !?
In the report I see en passant that the German youth magazine Bravo is still around (in print just barely, but there is bravo de). Dr. Sommer! Glied and Scheide in the 70s !
Now there’s a wholesome alternative to TikTok. I always thought Bravo was rather sweet, but I was not in the target group.
Concerning Dr. Haider, see the diss track “Straight outta Kärnten” on youtube. In the background of the cover photo is the snarky motto Sexismus gegen Rechts.
He’s dead, but TikTok pushes him on you anyway, early and often, if you create an account in Austria.
I’m not surprised Bravo is going nowhere. In the 90s I once found a Polish edition in my school in Vienna.