Friday foolishness: foreign words
Peter A. McGraw
pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU
Fri Sep 15 18:19:34 UTC 2000
You know, though, the "Einbahnstrasse" anecdote is at least plausible,
since you might see the sign on the side of a building where a street name
would normally appear. (Granted, the actual street-name sign would
normally be right above or below the "Einbahnstrasse" sign.)
In contrast, the "Ausgang" anecdote is completely bogus, since the word for
a freeway exit is "Ausfahrt," not "Ausgang." (Naturally this opens up a
slew of new possibilities for anecdotes, but I won't go there.)
Peter Mc.
--On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 2:05 PM -0400 "Dennis R. Preston"
<preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU> wrote:
> Suspect indeed. My favorite (or one of them) is about the old Polish
> villagers who go to Berlin for the first time. They speak no German. They
> park their Warszawa and carefully write down the name of the street so
> that they can at least show it to German-speakers and get back to it.
> After a day's fun in the big city, the show the sign to numerous
> passers-by, but all of them shake their heads and walk away. Their paper
> noted that they were parked on "Einbahnstrasse."
****************************************************************************
Peter A. McGraw
Linfield College * McMinnville, OR
pmcgraw at linfield.edu
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