A Queer Bag

I once tutored an extremely bright young freshman who, when prompted by his professor to write a more than modest-length essay about The Fear of the Unknown, twisted his brow, pouted angrily, and said, “but, if I ain’t know what it is, how can I be scared of it?” 

The contemporary system of American colleges and universities is unfortunately no stranger to such high feats of intellect. Much to the surprise of all, however, he did not finish the semester. And, although we might also wish for ourselves such a privileged life of gadding incompetence and drooling ease, we aren’t all so lucky. 

Having already conquered breathing and washing our bodies, those of us highly developed creatures who endeavor to understand a thing or two about our “reality” (as Nabokov would have written it) often sense The Unknown as something of a lurking fear. The English language contains no dearth of words within its lexicon to report on this effect. There are, however, fine discriminations betwixt selections. Let’s start with something that might make us feel a bit queer.

Queer did not always mean “affluent student with good parents and a need to be the center of attention,” rather it served as an adjective that described something as “strangely off,” or “oddly amiss.” Rumored to be derived from the German quer (oblique), queer also means feelin’ “slightly ill” (heard often in traditional Irish music), as if one were feeling not quite knowingly sick but wambling on the verge of something, perhaps along Queer Street. And to queer something has always meant “to spoil or ruin” it, which presents an interesting irony against today’s fashionable usurpation. In fact, I should wager queer now as a word almost entirely ironic. 

Strange is of French origin and means “something unusual or surprising,” specifically in a way that is “difficult to understand.” This may describe an external event or the way one feels, both of which usages arise from strange’s connotations with something “never before seen or encountered and likely unfamiliar,” even “alien,” which supports a notion of linkage with the archaic sense of the word: “unaccustomed to or unfamiliar with.” Odd would be the closest in meaning to strange, though not geographically. Odd was born and raised in Old Norse and also applies itself to numbers that have one left over as a remainder, whenever divided by two. Be there a connection between something’s being off-kilter and its lack of even division?

Fey is perhaps my favorite word to describe oddity, if only for its aesthetic appeal. Fey is a stronger word than strange or odd, for it connotes “an impression of vague unworldliness or mystery,” as well as describes someone as “having supernatural powers of clairvoyance.” Fey is of Germanic origin and has reached your eyes today through Dutch and Old English. There is also an archaic, Scottish definition that means “fated to die or at the point of death,” which leads one to wonder why Shakespeare, for Macbeth—or, The Scottish Play—chose to name the witches therein not The Fey Sisters, but rather The Weird Sisters.

In fact, The Weird Sisters makes complete sense and is, though it sounds commoner, a more sophisticated usage. Weird is also of Germanic origins and therefrom the Old English wyrd or “destiny,” or, more specifically, “having the power to control destiny.” German mythology defines weird closely to how the Greeks defined Fate. But, they are not the same. The German idea of weird means a web of interconnected events, of which a linear path can be neither drawn nor understood, whereas the Greek idea of fate took things more linearly. Something that’s weird is of unstoppable, pre-determined origins that, whilst momentarily fey, was ultimately a cosmic certainty. Nowadays, as most things, we’ve simplified it to mean “supernatural or unearthly,” or, if you’re of humbler ilk, “something bizarre,” which comes from the Italian bizzarro. In this sense, then, Macbeth, by powers beyond his reason and control, had always been doomed to something weird.

Though fate is an ancient Greek concept, we receive the word by way of Latin. Greek mythology’s The Fates presided over the birth and life of humans, each person’s destiny weaved by them: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—another three weird ladies. As a society, we tend to stick a bit etymologically truer to fate than to weird. Fate is a development of events within each person’s life that are outside of each person’s control, which, like things weird, are pre-determined and controlled supernaturally. Unlike weird, however, fate is thought as linear. Think of weird as a spider web and fate as a river.

Supernatural has been a difficult word to avoid using, as it is today used to describe essentially any force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature. Natural things, as we’ve come to understand them, are things native to our physical, material, observable world, things that can be sensed and are therefore measurable. Super- is a prefix that roughly means “over” or “above,” which has heavenly connotations. Preternatural is a near synonym, preter- meaning “beyond” or “more than.” 

There are also more secular, yet less powerful, words that one many employ to describe anything deviating from what is normal or usual—often in a way that is undesirable or worrying—words such as unusual, uncommon, and unconventional are decent neutral choices with a slight leaning in meaning towards societal normativism. Unorthodox is also a fine, middle-brow selection with some religious connotations. Abnormal and atypical are alternatives, but they’ve become bloodless, scientific bores that have actually taken on meanings of their own and have, like queer, become almost entirely ironic in nature. Outré would be a good, neutral choice for the Francophile who wants to describe a thing that is “beyond the limits of what it considered usual, normal, or proper” and carries the notion of “singularly unique,” which is an unfortunate contemporary redundancy to commit on the part of the Author, as “unique” has now essentially lost all meaning, for everyone is today “unique”—one need only a red streak in one’s hair.

Funny and Curious inhabit one category; both have amusing aspects, which can simultaneously describe something strange or unusual. Funny can describe something that arouses suspicion, as well as, like queer, one’s feeling “slightly but undefinably unwell.” Curious contains the obvious meaning of “eager to know or learn something” but can also be used as an adjective or nominative adjective to describe something that arouses the need to know or learn: “This is a curious novel; do you perhaps have a copy that I might borrow?”

Uncanny is a current crowd-pleaser, and is, in my opinion, a trifle over-used and will soon find itself queered. Uncanny describes something that’s simultaneously odd and unsettling, due to the described’s enigmatic nature and potentially threatening manifestation. Bandying nowadays about The Uncanny Valley is common. I’m bothered by the redundancy found in this phrase, as it describes by merely re-describing the definition of uncanny. A perhaps helpful metaphor, however, is the aim here. 

We’ll finish with a mystery. The meaning of the prefix myst-/myster-, which occupies a spot in English by way of Ancient Greek, Latin, and French, respectively, is best translated today as “one whose eyes are closed.” Anything with this prefix possesses a connotation of secret enigmatic strangeness. Moreover, it carries an esoteric sentiment, conjuring images of the soul or the spirit, rather than things material. And, finally, as in the case of things mystic or mystical, symbolic and allegorical significance that transcends human understanding is suggested, religion or the occult often implied. 

The Importance of the Unnecessary

Though a common misconception and favorite mantra of jealous minimalists the world over, “Charles Dickens was” not “paid by the word.” Rather, he was paid by installment. He did have, however, one highly enviable up on Twenty First Century lexoslaves in that he was paid. Nevertheless, no matter how one might want to spin Dickens’s preternatural ability to describe at length any and all things as merely a by-the-word, middle-brow money laundering scam, the fact remains that the gentleman could indeed describe. 

The Description is a lost art. And the Description has received this predicate nominative adjectival pejoration due to our unhealthy obsession with The Useful, The Economic, The Necessary. Why, when one failed poet in brown corduroy asks another yawning novelist on hiatus what his favorite epoch of literature is, does that same overweight adjunct professor always respond with “the Nineteenth Century?” The Nineteenth Century was the heyday of the novel—the heyday of Realism. And it is likely this truth that forces that same school-debt encumbered, part-time bike courier to reply with the century aforementioned.

Good Realist writers were/are concerned with (un)necessary detail. And it seems to be the unnecessary and not the necessary that reminds us of our world. Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, written in 1836, during only his twenty-fifth year on this earth, is not only a post-doctorate-level mirth-driven abdominal workout, but also an A-1 exercise in The Unnecessary. 

So, how does one write The Unnecessary? First, gather together all of your friends who are fluent in Ancient Greek. Now, perform the same task for those who are fluent in Latin. Very good. Now that you are still alone and with quite a bit of free time on your hands, this could be a great time to ponder the fact that the average sentence length, as compared from the time of Shakespeare to today, has decreased over seventy-five percent, from over seventy words per sentence to under fifteen. A much-needed decrease in convoluted thinking, some might say. A woeful increase in small ideas, others would riposte. Either way, it remains true that we use fewer words than ever to describe our world. 

In the olden days, before divorce and UberEATS, there was this thing called a Classical Education, whose interests were, briefly stated, to bestow onto its students a deep, rich, fulfilling connection with the roots of human civilization and a meaningful, unfractured perspective of the world. Sixteenth through Nineteenth Century students were ensconced in this education, and Charles Dickens was one of those lucky students, although he left formal schooling at eleven-years-old to work in a factory in order to amass the funds required to bail his father out of a debtors prison. Students of this time were well-versed in Ancient Greek and Latin, languages heavily reliant on the long sentence, or what is known to better people as hypotaxis. 

Hypotaxis enjoys many long-since-forgotten philological entreaties. A well-constructed bout of hypotaxis is scintillatingly complex. You remember complexity. Although there is much historical and contemporary evidence for the contrary, we do sometimes listen to and trust in those who actually think. Whether it proves competent or incompetent, hypotaxis of a good variety gains the reader’s trust, as it verifies that the narrator or character has thought a goodish deal about what he is saying. Try to convince an editor today to publish an opening sentence like the opening sentence of The Pickwick Papers:

“The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.”

Immediate trust.

Hypotaxis is also inherently polite. Moreover, hypotaxis is sexy; we inherently like to strip away its layers of meaning and tease our mental faculties with its hidden parts. 

Around 1900 or thereabouts, however, there came this newer and therefore, obviously, much better idea called a Progressive Education, which decided hypotaxis evil and the frenetic acquisition of office workers to be the most important pedagogical endeavor. 

In a contemporary world thoroughly wanting in hypotaxis, it is simplicity itself to find the correlation between the loss of the long sentence and the loss of the lengthy description. Consider just one of the hundreds of painstakingly detailed passages in Dickens’s description of a debtors prison:

“It was getting dark; that is to say, a few gas jets were kindled in this place which was never light, by way of compliment to the evening, which had set in outside. As it was rather warm, some of the tenants of the numerous little rooms which opened into the gallery on either hand, had set their doors ajar. Mr. Pickwick peeped into them as he passed along, with great curiosity and interest. Here, four or five great hulking fellows, just visible through a cloud of tobacco smoke, were engaged in noisy and riotous conversation over half-emptied pots of beer, or playing at all-fours with a very greasy pack of cards. In the adjoining room, some solitary tenant might be seen poring, by the light of a feeble tallow candle, over a bundle of soiled and tattered papers, yellow with dust and dropping to pieces from age, writing, for the hundredth time, some lengthened statement of his grievances, for the perusal of some great man whose eyes it would never reach, or whose heart it would never touch. In a third, a man, with his wife and a whole crowd of children, might be seen making up a scanty bed on the ground, or upon a few chairs, for the younger ones to pass the night in. And in a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh, the noise, and the beer, and the tobacco smoke, and the cards, all came over again in greater force than before.”

According to James Wood’s How Fiction Works, nineteenth-century Realism bolstered the birth of the unnecessary detail: “19^th-century realism…creates such an abundance of detail…that it will always contain a certain superfluidity, a built-in redundancy, that it will carry more detail than it needs. In other words, fiction builds into itself a lot of surplus detail just as life is full of surplus detail.” Dickens’s above passage is uncommon in today’s fiction because of its overabundance of detail. Of course, it paints a nineteenth-century picture, but it serves no ulterior motive but to describe for the reader the scene; it describes itself for itself; it enjoys the existence of itself for itself. The Detail is enough; it is its own end.

Let us turn to a man unafraid to let his pen run wild, the prince of petty himself, Oscar Wilde: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

Wordsymthe’s Fine Wares

I hear a lot of talk nowadays about free speech. The truth is, however, that, for the halfwit, language always costs something. Wordsworth never wrote too much about a word’s worth, as it wasn’t worth it to him; advertisers, however, have considered this idea, and, since then, they’ve been capitalizing on your desire to buy a moment’s identity.

Fancy yourself fond of the Quaint and the Cozy? Perhaps you’re best sold by a bit of the Olde. Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic antiquity have been deemed by Moderns as the kings of all things quaint and cozy. To sell rubbish of the like, the key is to sound not too old, so as to confuse and intimidate your customers with a powerful ancientness. Rather, if a business wants to sell a sleepy evening, just throw, as Rich Boy might have suggested, a few e’s on it. Additionally helpful would be a k or two, or, if you’re of bolder ilk, three. Ye Olde Gifte Shoppe works well on your standard child but take heed—those with a need for tweed require more sophisticated ruses as adults and thusly seek establishments anointed with such titles as Pumblechook’s Publick House, Sigrid’s Steake and Steinn, or Wycliffe Taverne. And a post-prandial stroll would be better appreciated upon Grosvenor’s Greene than upon anything merely green. 

So, you want Cozy but not necessarily Black-Plague-and-dysentery-in-the-chamber-pot cozy? You might, then, just consider something vaguely British. American orthography and speech, although often etymologically older than our dentist-less counterparts’, have been deemed by the hoi polloi as too modern. Indeed, the English have been chosen as the gatekeepers of Cozy, even their books on murder and grand deception donning the title “Cozies.” Yes, simply anglicize anything you’d like by a smidgen, and you have yourself not a boring, old, belt-line-to-your-armpits American movie theater stinking of Stetson cologne, but a Centre Cinema. It’s not curb service, you bean-burning cowboy, rather kerb service. Tire Town is tired, so make it Village Tyres. Whether you’re selling favours, colours, programmes, or connexions, they all, with a bit of the Union Jack jacking things around, sound identical but look somehow classier.

Although I might argue that people find the Brits cute due to the modern caricature of their previous ways resembling something vaguely child-like, another way to swindle someone with the Sweet would be to jettison the Anglophilia for a moment to inhabit the orthography of a true child. This method works best on people with lots of money and no taste. With pockets full and head empty, Kathy stops by the Kit Kat Klub, and Beth, who is not a big reader, by Olive ‘r Twist Cocktails. Mark finds nothing wrong with the Kuntry Kitchen’s rather salty menu, neither Sandy with the Sip ’n’ Sup’s predictable array. And the business performed by the Knick-Knack Knook caters mostly to those with an appetite for local history at second-hand prices. So, k’s are cute yet classless.

Many of your contemporaries will mention to you that they find class systems to be archaic forms of arbitrary hierarchy under which oppression is the main side-dish, yet those same many are just as hungry to purchase their spot. Which shop possesses the pleated trousers on which one may really count? Dave’s Pants Store? or The Regiment for Men? There’s a sale this weekend at both Hal’s Hut and Lorrimer Limited. Where exists the better buy? You are to buy a wedding gift for lost-trusted friend: as regards general quality, does the General Outlet Depot or Regency Room Exclusives ring the sacred bell of fraternity? Fine wares are desired: The Squire Shop, Carriage Trade Fashions, or Joe’s Quality Goods? Wrong. So, why did we choose those other stores? My bet is that we see these titles as resembling those of the nineteenth century’s, a century associated with class. 

And nothing says class to the philistine like anything French. It’s a certainty in English: use more French-derived words, sound smarter. In 1066 A.D. the French talked it over with the English, and English said it would be OK to let them run the island for a while. Therefrom the French perfumed up the place for a few hundred years. Chaucer wasn’t into it, but everyone else who knew what was what did their business in French. Therefore, French words in English hold a special, higher place in the lexicon. If one wants to kill an animal and turn his or her skin or flesh into either a bag, shoe, or dinner, just throw a French appellation on it, and things are all right. 

For example, two gentlemen walk into L’endroit Pour Manger, which they know to be spectacular. One asks what’s in the Soupe du jour. The waitress, new to her craft, ventures a wry one: “It changes every day.” That same gentleman smiles blankly. The other gentleman submits a perusal to the le menu and runs a stubby finger over and subsequently stumbles painfully through pronouncing the following:

• Oeufs durs et crudiés de la saison, “well done, please.”

Our waitress smiles. And for dessert?

• Pommes de terre frites et haricots verts du potager

But illiteracy can also be used to one’s advantage. Imagine that you need to sell tons of garbage in bulk quantities to simple, no-fuss folk with a job to do. The salt of the earth can’t be bothered with the French, neither have they time for English. Who needs to lay a tough coat of caulk, whenever one could grab a tube of Tuff-Kote. Need to slap up something quick? Try Kwik-Kote Paint. Why work hard, whenever Redi-Kash loans are easy? Dri-Kleen spot remover for those meatball sandwich stains—E-Z-Gro fertilizer for the do-it-yourselfer who takes no guff. Even jetsetters sometimes struggle with reading. For that, there’s the fairly priced Nite-Flite Air Fares. 

It’s Not Alright

If I were given a dime for every time I’ve heard “but, language is flexible; it changes,” then I should have just a few extra dollars, for my friends, thank God, are not literature undergraduates. The damage that this now worthless phrase has inflicted upon my heart, however, must have already cost me a fortune.

Why is it not alright?

It’s not alright because it’s not all right; it has nothing to do with being stuffed to the nipples with methane. Whenever one embarks upon alright, one is truly searching for all right.

All right means that everything’s “all right,” as in it’s not at all left, as in it’s not at all evil, as in it’s all good. 

Whenever something’s all right, all acts as an adverb, describing the adjective (or nominative adjective) right, which, in this case, is intensifying the rightness. 

To wantonly use alright is not the sign of an understanding soul more accepting of newcomers, rather of poor discriminatory abilities. Surely, homophones can be a nuisance in English, but the fact that we cannot persuade that same homophone-sufferer that listening to audiobooks is not the same as reading should not be our problem to bear. 

Those at fault, however, are somewhat intelligently attempting to truncate the word into a word-pattern similar to those they’ve before seen. Perhaps top form here would be to provide a comparative list of distinctions, and, through this, describe what all right offenders believe to be doing. 

All ready: All serves as a pronoun that describes a group of people who, or things that, are prepared to begin, or ready. “We are all ready to sacrifice grandma.” 

Already: An adverb of time, already describes something that has happened before, or is presently underway with, something else: “We have (are) already sacrificed (ing) grandma.” 

All together: This describes how several things or people are currently oriented, or how something (or someone) is to be done, which is to say that everything or everyone is in one place or group, or that something (or someone) is to be done all at once: “Let’s put the Christmas trees all together, so that we can celebrate all together.”

Altogether: An adverb describing how something is to be done all in one place, or in a group, or otherwise all at once: “Why don’t we just throw the Christmas trees out altogether?” 

The same connective logic applies with a part: The indefinite article (a) and singular noun (part) describe one element that is not necessarily a part of a larger whole but could be: “A part of me believes that my toaster talks back to me, which could be a part of my problem.” A part cannot, although taken apart physically, cannot describe something that has been taken apart.

Apart unparted tempts those again with this tendency to confuse parted forms with the adverbial form, which, in this case, modifies “tear”: “You don’t want me in your house; I’ll tear that place apart.”

Any way: Any is a determiner; way is a noun. Witness and behold: “You could do the job in any way that you like, as long as you get it done.”

Anyway: “Forget it. You don’t have the correct tools, anyway.”

Some time: “I have some time on Friday to meet, if you would like.”

Sometime: “I would certainly like to meet sometime, but Friday does not work for me.”

Now consider the interesting case of a pace and apace.

A pace: A pace consists of an indefinite article (a) and a noun (pace): Select a pace on the treadmill that is right for you.”

Apace: An adverb that means to do something swiftly or quickly: “As I have only thirty minutes to complete five miles, I shall forsooth endeavor to move my legs apace.”

This pace case, although idiotically described, shows the vast area for misinterpretation of which the written word, if wielded incorrectly, is so easily capable, which is a nice segue into pure idiocy.

A lot—Allot—Alot 

A lot is used in English by all to bypass the Words of Number/Amount conundrum, as “a lot” can be used to refer to “a lot” of pencils on the desk, but also “a lot” of chocolate pudding spread all over the sidewalk. Allot is a verb that means to apportion or provide a certain amount of something to someone or another thing. 

Alot: not a word. 

This is all to say that there’s no way around it: Alright is an outright error, for alright is not a word; it attempts to supplant one word that already has its own logic with nothing. Alright attempts to slip the Trojan Horse in through the backdoor but doesn’t hold up. But enough of that talk. 

Fowler, Elster, and many other authorities on the English language hold firm that alright be either fashionable, barbarism, or something worse. The modern Fowler’s, fudged around with by Butterfield, suggests a compromise. Butterfield says that we should keep all right in its rightful place yet further asserts that alright could be used to distinguish from all as a pronoun, as in many of the above examples, as well as simply using alright for the adverbial form, much like we use already and altogether. He suggests two other reasons for a distinction to be made, but malarky smells worse whenever piled upon one another, I assume. 

The Dosser Chronicles: Germany—A Dosser Doubles Down

Halt.

The best description of the German, his environment, and his soul has already been written. To read the most accurate artifact anent the modern Teuton, visit my previous article , or circumvent the middleman altogether by purchasing Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel. For an exact and unbiased treatise on the German language, seek “The Awful German Language,” located in Appendix D of Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad. 

***

A dark-haired woman-porter approximately six feet in height, with the shoulders of an experienced dairy farmer and wearing a red jacket with gold fringe, growled at me in what seemed like the Yiddish of a professional wrestler. 

“Fahrkartenkontrolle,” she snarled again.

“Hello.”

Not long after that I felt a large hand persuade me out of the train and provide thereafter a hefty push. It was when I was lying on the main train station’s platform and staring up at the bottom of an enormous brown boot, behind which the milkmaid’s face could be seen laughing deeply, which earned the laughter of her male comrades, that I knew I had reached Bonn, Germany.

Or, at least that is how my memory had recalled the event. I realized later, however, that this is just called “not knowing the language.” In fact, I’m beginning to doubt that I ever was pushed at all. 

Anyone who’s taken an American train or been in an American train station will know that, although he or she might have never been to Germany, Germany’s is better. This is true. Bonn’s train station is a work of some admirability, nearing perhaps the architectural grandeur of at least a half-respectable American museum or public metropolitan library.

But the American Imagination, at some point, went one step further, conjuring up Germany as one sleek, uncut unit of clean lines, smooth rides, and punctual pink heads moving swiftly and logically in and out of crisply closing doors. But this apt metaphor of German automotive expertise does not seem to have yet translated to the railway sector. 

The next two trains for which I was scheduled were both delayed—significantly and ignominiously. The next one didn’t show up altogether. A few moments later, the announcer over the loud-speaker, in so many words, expressed that we suck it up thusly.

Soon after, reliable word was relayed to me from an authentic German source: “Welcome to Germany.” Perhaps in another epoch, was this true: Germans are punctual. No longer. I know no less punctual a people. 

Typically, where there are trains, there are homeless. This naturally leads me to my first observation on Germany’s homeless population: there aren’t any—at least by American standards. Sure, perhaps they don’t have a home, but this isn’t enough to suffice the definition of the term. I’m looking for something closer to my face, screaming, and ostensibly in-touch with things beyond our corporeal world. In any case, it’s easy to dislike, indeed grow Scrooge-like to the American breed. 

Here they read books, speak two or three languages (not one of them German), and place their offering plates out of their own reach, their heads lowered in the Old Style. And they’re polite as well. I don’t always give money to German bums, but, when I do, there’s some Dickensian satisfaction about the whole thing. I should forsooth sooner trust your standard German bum over your standard American landscaper or roofer any day of the week. Your standard German bum has yet some class.

And, speaking of good bums, I’ve realized why there is precisely zero crime in Germany. Apparently, the entire German police force is entirely comprised of beautiful, young women. And who would want to put his hands on a beautiful, young woman? You’ve never lived until you’ve seen a young German policewoman make a U-turn at a busy mid-day intersection. She is in her habitat; she looks right doing it. Her tight ponytail reveals a German face in its rightful place of intensity, her German body covered in what looks most correct on a German: a uniform. To what crime she is reporting, however, is of great mystery to me. There are statistics online stating that crime indeed occurs in Germany. I’m certain, however, that one could walk drunk across Germany in a suit made of legal tender and only come out of it the richer. It is my assertion that someone in Sector 5 had been reported seen without his daily ice cream. 

The Hindus worship the cow in their way, and the Germans do it in theirs. In a fashion hitherto by Yours Truly unseen, everyone is eating ice cream. They flock from all around just to gawk at it religiously through the glass. It borders on a cultish feeling. And the weather and its temperature seem not to affect how the Germans prefer ice cream: they want it cold and by the bucket. I heard one German mother ask her toddler daughter what she wanted to do that afternoon, and the little tike said, “look at the ice cream.” 

I praise Germany’s treatment of children; the children here are treated as adults. In the United States, an independent, well-adjusted, un-murdered child who walks home on his or her own is an extinct species. Everyone in the purlieu of an American child is only there to either end its precious, innocent life, or in some way make it permanently much worse. In Germany, children are walking home en masse. They’re wandering the streets. Taking trains. Frequenting bars. Adults are talking to them—petting their heads. And who wouldn’t want to pet the head of a German child? Barring Asian competition, German babies inhabit the role of cutest babies on Earth—pink, smiling nuggets already in perfect step with the authority of their parents and eager to learn the laws of the land. As Jerome K. Jerome reports about German children in his book Three Men on the Bummel: “‘you get yourself born,’ says the German government to the German citizen, ‘we do the rest’.” 

One does not merely follow the rules in Germany, rather the rules simply exist and to follow them is to follow the highest ideal. And, against all my contrarian sympathies, there’s something to that. I know not if one must trade freedom in order to be safe. But, it must absolutely be said that the German world is a safe one. Imagine a universe where, upon staring at someone in the eyes, no one’s looking to “knuckle-up” or “run it.” “Moin!” Anna says at 9:00. Not much of a morning man myself, I notice this immediately. “Abend!” Hans chimes in at 18:00, and the good fight continues for the Germans. And they’re winning. There is a quality of life here that the Americans cannot touch. I’ve never felt like the biggest scallywag of the populace before, but it is as such now. The people here remind one of a dairy products advertisement: broad-shouldered, trusting folk who work hard, tell it straight, and smell of high-brow cabbage.

There are other kinds of curious effects from this law-abiding soul that one may witness within the populace. This is most readily observed at German crosswalks. If it is your desire to see an American soul squirm, tell it to stand at an empty crosswalk and wait for the red light to turn green. You’ll sooner see it take up arms and storm the Capitol than wait the duration. Germans, however, “are willing, nay anxious” to obey the supreme law of the traffic light. It is, in fact, a curious thing to see a group of Germans, with no cars for miles, waiting for the crosswalk sign to turn green. And they’re all doing it with that unmistakable German Look, which has simultaneously something vacant yet intensely preoccupied about it. A German either stares into your soul or doesn’t notice you at all. And they do it all in the middle of the sidewalk, especially if they’re over sixty years of age. An inordinate number of Germans are also contemplating water, perhaps because they have none. In the faces of these Germans looking at creeks, one can see how the German mind, so many years ago, saw a lake and said contentedly to itself: “See.” 

In crosswalk finality, if you cross during this time, the shibboleth has been uttered, and you certainly feel the biblical stare as you safely glide from one side to another, looking back from your final destination, wondering at the big German bodies.

And I must say that the people here certainly are large. The broadness of the American shoulder is one of worldwide acclaim, and, in more recent years, the broadness of the American waist. But I speak now of pure size. About fifty percent of the women in this country rival my height, and the other half take careful daily measures not to step on me. The men are giants, plain and simple. It’s no wonder that they gave the Romans such a hard time, and why it took the entire world, twice, to persuade them to have a seat. And those coming from countries even farther north look almost majestic in their height. Nordic women could be mistaken, to the pragmatic American eye, for something mythological. 

But make no mistake: they desire to be governed. And the German government is happy to oblige. The bureaucracy in Germany is something of an ultimate test of patience. I really do believe Sigmund Freud to be essentially entirely a charlatan, but I have noticed your standard German citizen to possess a goodish degree of impatience, and I believe that to be due to his relationship to the parental unit: the government. If I were born with the name of Sixty-Four And One-Quarter, I should still feel less like a number than I currently do. It is rumored that Kafka is a humorist. To me, he’s merely German journalism. Franz Kafka is not known for his particularly exuberant feelings about bureaucracy. Kafka’s 1926 “novel” The Castle (itself a reliable visitor’s guide to Germany) is no exception to Kafka’s stark commitment against that stinky, French word, even going so far as to die in order to spare himself the displeasure of having to write a second draft. Notions of the like are apparent in the interactions amongst the populace. I’m waiting for someone to hand me a form to Commence Conversation, and, at its end, another to confirm Conversation Termination. 

But there are obvious positives to this. The sense of perennial hierarchy in Germany keeps in-tact many things that, in the United States, are now but relics of a lost, better time. There’s still the idea of class in Germany, which is generally desirable, knowing intimately the effects of a society without any. The system of contemporary American values currently runs things in quite the opposite fashion; the better one’s lot, the more one tries to prove one’s egalitarianism, and those already at the bottom beat their chests and scratch their loincloths accordingly. Indeed, it is here where the noses of difference can be most seen peeping over the cultural fence. And the German lifestyle, in this case, is far preferable to the American one. Moreover, things work well, there’s enough to go around, and people respect the nighttime hours as hours of sleep. 

As for classroom and educational culture, Germany’s respect for authority and hierarchy takes over. The teachers are the experts, and the pupils are there to learn from them. Students of all ages assume teachers masters or mistresses of their subjects, and, as such, it is poor decorum to interrupt the learning process by interjecting, imposing upon, or otherwise derailing the learning process. And, if a teacher is proven incompetent, then he or she is shown the door and put back on the excellent German unemployment whence he or she came. In the United States, the teacher is often something of a walking target for physical and spiritual pranks. In the inner-cities of The United States, one is better off with a degree in cage-fighting than of any academic subject. To some more “progressive” souls, the German system might seem intellectually limiting. I ask you, then, to compare the success of a standard German education to an American one. You will find it difficult, as there is not one. The Germans drag us through the mud. And, to me, that says something.

But, under the weight of all this German quality and control, one inescapably ugly variable reigns supreme. 

How does it happen? Who allows it? How do German minds conceive it? Why is it not cleaned up? The graffiti, of course. It biffs the foreign eye with great heft. Amongst such genuinely gorgeous villages and landscapes, the cacographic scrawlings of the bottom tenth percentile lay thereon with the omnipresence of a short man at the helm of a governmental structure. What’s more amazing is that the populace seems not only to tolerate it, but rather to embrace it. In the middle of the day, “professionals” of the aforementioned trade take up arms, take it to the streets, and undertake masterpieces. Cars drive by, but the “artists” continue. Pedestrians look on with indifference. The elderly dodder by unphased as Germany is tattooed to the teeth. Here, I side with the Yanks’ take that graffiti is to be contained to areas in which graffiti is the best that area can conceive, and if it occurs elsewhere, shoot it dead with the biggest gun possible.

Notwithstanding her take on graffiti, Germany’s is a culture that seems to value logic—this championing of logic undoubtedly playing a role in its being the highly detail-oriented culture that it is. It might also claim some stake in the German’s reputation for being humorless. 

But to suggest that the Germans possess no sense of humor is a joke. Everything that these people do is for the sake of humor; they sacrifice themselves at the altar of it. They’ve got humor here down to a science and are committed to it on a societal level. Leather shorts? They must be putting it on. Try it. Tell a joke, make fun of someone, make fun of yourself, turn a good phrase, use irony, satirize something, understate the absurd: your average German will best you with his deadpan face. And, just to prove his comedic superiority, he will up you with the ultimate: “I don’t think that’s true.” Indeed, everything that they do is funny, for they are, without a doubt, one of the goofiest groups of people I’ve ever seen. All jokes aside, they’re definitely laughing about something out here. I hear them do it. About what, I’m not sure.

I have a decent guess, though. There’s a practice here called “walking,” which, auricularly, I have difficultly differentiating from the English “walking.” In practice, however, the distinction is tacit. Germans claim that the poles they use to thrust off the ground exist as practice for whenever cross-country skiing is again possible. It is my belief, however, that this be not for the off-months’ practice for skiing, rather more in line with the well-known German past-time of waking up, eating something with mayonnaise, and saying to herself, “but, how do I make it goofier?”

As regards a quick note on food in the main, as previously noted, you better like it with mayonnaise. Or pork. If not, you’re liable to starve. Waking up on Sunday in Germany to an empty refrigerator is another surefire way, as “Shoot On Sight” laws have been applied to all grocery-seeking patrons on Sundays. And, in those grocery stores, which are closed on Sundays, there exists a race therein called “cashiers.” There’s something akin to this race in English-speaking lands, but it is not identical. Your German cashier can be found sitting behind the register in any store where legal tender is accepted. Their language is a simple yet consistent one: “Hallo. Kassenbon? (or) Beleg?  Schönen(es) Tag/Abend/ (or) Wochenende. Tschuss.” They do not waver from those words. 

Thereafter, a shopping cart is thrusted into the back of your knees, and you are swiftly shown the door. Indeed, whenever one enters a German register line, one’s priorities should be sorted not unlike in manner as those of the military officer’s a few days before the big charge, for there’s no going back. But Germans always play it fair. They foreshadow, indeed, warn you of the forthcoming experience the first moment that you enter the store, with those gates that open on the righthand side and close after you go through them. Even the stores have a German personality: start on the right and move to the left. If you try to leave through the entrance gates, thus disrupting the order of things, the gate growls. If you do not buy anything, then you must go through the shameful experience of squeezing your way past the people in line at the cash register, as empty register-lines are always cordoned with a steel turnstile. This aids the German economy significantly.

German dogs, unlike German humans, possess significant autonomy in Germany, indeed enjoy a great deal of freedom here, for dogs always walk sans leash. To see a dog on a leash here has the same effect on the eye as seeing a child on a leash, which always renders an effect of disbelief. Bicycles here are one way for a human to experience the same joy as a dog. There’s an air of superiority exuding from those riding them, and, if you’re in the way of one, expect no clemency.  

German windows are also of an unprecedented nature. Someone in Germany, at some point, must have said to another: “let’s have the best windows in the world.” And then, like a German, he did what they said.

Unlike those in the Anglosphere, Germans like get to the point. Goofy or not, Germans do value directness of communication. This can lead one to interpret them as rude or perhaps soulless. 

I, for one, am not certain of this latter diagnosis. I side a bit more with Jerome K. Jerome’s scientific take on the matter:

“The Germans are a good people…I am positive that the vast majority of them go to heaven… [that the] the soul of a single individual German has [however] the sufficient initiative to fly up by itself and knock on St. Peter’s door, I cannot believe. My own opinion is that they are taken there in small companies, and passed in under the charge of a dead policeman.”

In today’s case, the policeman might be some sort of high-standing bureaucratic official, like a Vodafone representative.

In every case, however, the Germans are, without a doubt, lovely, passionate creatures who try their little, Döner-filled hearts out every day to be the model of what I imagine the closest thing to a Good Person looks like. And, they often succeed. I, too, am certain that the overwhelming majority go to heaven–as long as they don’t have to make it there by train.

Main Points of the German Language:

• “Huh?” is “hää?”; “um” is “ärhm” ; “ow” is “owuh.”

• “Excuse me” is “hmph.” 

• “Hallo” is reserved for shop-owners or done entirely with the eyes—and everything is “schön.” In fact, I’m convinced that one could get away in German with word alone. 

• Or “ja,” which is used in all cases whenever another word cannot be found. In English-speaking countries, the “yes” system is a trifle more varied. We use various “yes types” to convey various moods or indicate certain various forms of subtle information. The German, “ja” is not only sufficient, but a sign of fluency.

• Only educated German women speak German. German men utter collections of grunts very near German; it sounds like it, rings the same consonant-gilded bell, but ultimately falls short of intelligibility. As regards the German language in the main, they both make it up as they go along.