Stuff and Moonshine

Spent the past weekend with a migraine that segued mid-Sunday into the first cold I’ve had in two years, which was an improvement over the migraine but still knocked me flat enough that I wasn’t able to come in to work until today. Shoutout to the co-worker who covered my desk Monday and Tuesday, not only for doing so but for leaving me a box of tissues.

Andrew found and downloaded a bunch of high-quality files of old movies, so yesterday (I think—my sense of time is still a bit muddled) we watched The Testament of Doctor Mabuse, which for various reasons is scarier to me than it was a few years ago. It’s still beautifully textured, especially in the copy we saw, and wryly funny in many places. My German is not yet advanced enough to follow conversations (particularly rapid 1930s-era ones) without the support of subtitles, but every so often my brain was able to pick out a word and then OHNE or BLEIB or GANZEN would flash behind my eyes.

Attempting to learn another language as an adult has highlighted a few things about just how I perceive words—I’ve known for a long time that when I read, I tend to hear the text; and that when someone’s speaking, I see the words somewhere in my head like title cards or a teleprompter. But I’m beginning to suspect that I actually need to have a handle on both the sound and the spelling, or I don’t get that little click of recognition, and I can’t parse the word at all—which rather makes me wonder how I would have fared in a pre-literate society. Perhaps imagery would’ve served the same purpose.

There’s been an extensive billboard campaign in Toronto, for a product called Iögo, that focuses on the umlaut. In the words with umlauts I know how to pronounce (noël, maïs), the meaning of the accent seems to be “pronounce this vowel separately, don’t run it together with the vowel in front of it.” Help me out here, etymologist – am I correct in this? If I am, then Iögo should be pronounced “I-o-go,” like Iowa or iodine; but it’s yogurt, so I think they want you to say it “yogo,” and it’s another case of the umlaut being purely for effect, like in Mötorhead.

While I’m ranting, have we calmed down about “literally” yet? I think the next word to be officially redefined will be “fragrant.” I don’t think in the past decade I’ve ever seen it used except as an ironic euphemism for “foul-smelling.” Then again, fragrance still means perfume, which may keep fragrant in the ironic euphemism category instead of letting it slip over into literally meaning stinky.

/word rant

Also, I now want someone in Iowa to start pushing for the state to be renamed Iöwa, thus making it 82% cooler in the public estimation.