Mike Pilewski writes about life, politics and culture in the United States
The next Star Wars movie is months away, but its second “teaser trailer”, out since mid-April, has already got fans excited. Those of you not very familiar with Star Wars may at least recall how the overwhelming popularity of the “original trilogy” — Episodes IV through VI, which came out in 1977–83 — contrasted with general disappointment at the “prequels” … >>
The Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, under way since February 7, have taught us a big lesson: Russia may lag behind English- and German-speaking countries in winter sports, but it is far ahead of us in orthographic efficiency. Russian needs only four letters to spell the name of the host city: Сочи. English needs five, while German — for shame! … >>
The Internet has come a long way in the last 25 years. Once the exclusive domain of scientists and the military, it’s now in the offices, living rooms and phones of almost everyone on the planet. One thing, however, has not changed: the propensity of users with inadequate social skills to torment one another in nitpicky arguments. This became more … >>
Just about every job I’ve ever had has involved handling a certain amount of correspondence. Learning the semantic difference between Herzliche Grüße, Beste Grüße, Freundliche Grüße and Mit freundlichen Grüßen was a big and very necessary step in my first office job in Germany. In the same way, we know that a lot of you are confused by what seem … >>
After two and a half years, my high-school German class reached a milestone when our teacher put away the textbook and got out the board games. We were so proud to have learned enough of a language that we could actually do something with it. Monopoly wasn’t a language game per se, but playing it in German taught us important … >>
Back when I was a newsreader for my college radio station, I was shown one of the thickest books I’d ever seen: a binder containing, I guess, about 500 pages. Those were all the rules an American radio station had to follow, as laid down by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). While I found the book daunting, my contemporaries found … >>
German is an easy language to learn, but it’s not an easy language to pronounce. The umlauts and the “ch” are only the first hurdle. Letters like “l”, “r” and “y” are tricky. You have to know where to split compound words, and it takes a while to get the intonation right. Tourists sound horrible when they try to pronounce … >>
My dad never goes to the supermarket. Well, he does, but he just calls it “the market”. Why exaggerate? If Americans are having a good time, they’ll say things are “great”. Not Dad. To him, everything’s “fine”. He means the same thing, but it sounds more honest. I find this refreshing. For decades, an inflation of intensifiers has been corrupting … >>
This column was originally written for Spotlight Online. As some of you may know, I write the Replay section you hear on Spotlight Audio each month. We present the voices of people who have been in the news and explain the language they use. The language we use when giving background to recent events is just as important. A few … >>
You can’t get any more American than this: a sport that was long considered our “national pastime” and whose yearly championship — played only between US teams — is rather pretentiously called the World Series. Although baseball had its heyday from 1900 to about 1950, it’s still popular: 19 million people watched last year’s championship between the New York Yankees … >>