Alex's Journal

I have two semesters left before I graduate from college. That means I will be finished in May 2010. Afterwards I want to teach English or American history somewhere in Germany, but I don’t know how I can go about getting that kind of position. I want to be in Germany for at least two or three years to solidify my German. It doesn’t matter who I teach. A Gymnasium (German high school equivalent) is good or a university or an institute would work as well.

Does anyone happen to know where I could look online? It’s a bit early for it, but I want to start now so I can start directly after I graduate.

I’ve posted my first post to Manifestly Absurd. It’s an argument I got into with an Australian friend of mine about the English language.

I’ve also created 2 versions of the blog. I want to do a direct comparison of Blogger vs WordPress and therefore have created a blog of Manifestly Absurd on both. You can choose one and let me know which one you like better. You can find them here:

WordPress – http://manifestlyabsurd.wordpress.com
Blogger – http://manifestlyabsurd.blogspot.com

I’ve started a new blog called Manifestly Absurd. There I will be writing posts on various things that I find entirely absurd and what I find very logical. You can find the blog here: http://manifestlyabsurd.blogspot.com.

I decided to host this new one on Blogger just to give it a try since I use a lot of Google’s other services. So far there are a lot of things I like about it that WordPress doesn’t have, but there are a lot of things Blogger doesn’t have that WordPress has. We’ll see how it goes.

I will be letting everyone know here as well when I post something new on Manifestly Absurd.

I have to admit that I think Mark Twain has to be one of my favorite authors of all time. His wittiness and writing is amazing. While everyone knows his books such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, most people don’t know about a lot of the essays he wrote. One such essay that I, as a college student studying German, find the most hilarious is his essay thoroughly picking apart the German language. He uses a lot of good humor in describing the difficulties and ridiculous parts of the language which, as a German student, I can fully sympathize with.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from it:

“One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, “Let the pupil make careful note of the following EXCEPTIONS.” He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it.”

“Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing “cases” where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me.”

“There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech–not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary–six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam–that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses, making pens with pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it–AFTER WHICH COMES THE VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb–merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out–the writer shovels in “HABEN SIND GEWESEN GEHABT HAVEN GEWORDEN SEIN,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.”

“Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance in this language, and should have been left out. For instance, the same sound, SIE, means YOU, and it means SHE, and it means HER, and it means IT, and it means THEY, and it means THEM. Think of the ragged poverty of a language which has to make one word do the work of six–and a poor little weak thing of only three letters at that. But mainly, think of the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey. This explains why, whenever a person says SIE to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.”

“When a German gets his hands on an adjective, he declines it, and keeps on declining it until the common sense is all declined out of it. It is as bad as Latin. [...] I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.”

“Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. [...] In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.”

“My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.”

To read the full text (and it’s worth it, even if you don’t study German), visit this page: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html

[digg=http://www.digg.com/odd_stuff/w00t_is_not_a_word]This flat out sickens me:

“‘w00t,’ an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary.

Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster Inc. said ‘w00t’ — typically spelled with two zeros — reflects a new direction in the American language led by a generation raised on video games and cell phone text-messaging.”

I really don’t think that “w00t” is a word much less should be crowned the word of the year. The direction the English language is taking due to the use of words like this I find very saddening and for a prestigious institution such as Merriam-Webster to go about promoting it is just out right disgusting.