overheard

This morning on the metro I was sitting behind a young woman who was making some phone calls. The first one was to some office and goshgolly she was *trying* to step up the formality of her speech. She was getting transferred around and kept asking people if she was going to be able to prove residency with a state ID, except she was saying, "Is it suffice to have a state ID?" Ooh. Try "sufficient" next time. Or try using a normal sentence that you know how to say.

Other source of entertainment: After that, she called a friend to report, and at the end of the conversation she said - said - "TTYL." What? The kids are speaking in IM-speak now? I guess I'd heard "OMG" out loud, but I thought it was being used ironically. Does it make me an old fogey if I prefer to say "omigod" and "talktoyalater"?

die Ostalgie

We learned the best word in German today: die Ostalgie. "Nostalgie" means nostalgia and "Osten" is East Germany, so stick them together and you get a word that means nostalgia for the good ol' days of the German Democratic Republic.

When I was in Colorado with my parents, I made them watch the movie Good Bye Lenin! - and today my teacher mentioned it as the beginning of the Ostalgie-Wave. It's about this boy whose mother is in a coma when the Berlin Wall falls and her doctor says it could kill her to find out the truth, so he recreates East Germany in their apartment. It's sweet, and for people who lived in East Germany, it evokes the lives they lived in a country that no longer exists - the cars, the weird coffees and canned beans, everything they grew up with. It's a nice little movie and I highly recommend it.

Then for the reasons why you might *not* want to go back to East Germany, watch The Lives of Others. (Glad you liked it, Dahvay - that movie is the bomb, am I right??)

In other German pop culture news, I read in the Berlin Lonely Planet today that the U2 song "Zoo Station" is about Bahnhof Zoo, an old train station in Berlin that used to be full of street people and teenage heroin addicts and whatnot.

I am so psyched to go to Berlin and see all this stuff.

gizzard

Tonight I went to a French restaurant with S.Vix and was kind of surprised by the number of things on the menu I didn't want - I hate eggs and cheese and I'm not that into organ meats. This made me feel like a nasty, picky American, particularly the organ meat thing, so I decided on a salad that included duck gizzards. I picked this partly because I wasn't 100% sure what gizzards were, which is a clear advantage over sweetbreads.

If you have also wondered about gizzards, my Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1974 ed.) says: The muscular enlargement of the alimentary canal of birds that immediately follows the crop and has usually thick muscular walls and a tough horny lining for grinding the food.

So it's stomach. I guess that's not so bad. Just for entertainment, I checked some of the other dictionaries on my shelf:

• Webster's New World Dictionary, Third College Edition (1988) - The second stomach of a bird: it has thick muscular walls and a tough lining for grinding food that has been partially digested in the first stomach. (Did dictionaries get easier in those 14 years or does this publisher written for dumber people than the other one?)

• Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1959) - derives, with -ard substituted for -er, from ME giser: OF giser (later gisier, F gésier): VL gigērium: by b/f from L gigēria, poultry-entrails offered as sacrifice, (later) gizzard: perh of Iranian origin; perh also akin to L iecur, liver.

• Cappelen Engelsk Ordbok (2004) - krås. (That's Norwegian.)

• Harper Collins German Dictionary (1990) - Apparently this dictionary doesn't cover bird anatomy. I think it might be time for a new German dictionary.

• Cassell's French Dictionary (1978) - gésier, m.

• American Heritage Spanish Dictionary (2000) - molleja.

• McKay's Modern English-Swedish Swedish-English Dictionary (1965) - kräva.

So now you know how to avoid gizzards in many languages, including Middle English! No, really, they were fine - just dense little pieces of meat. Much less freaky than the chicken hearts I had at a Brazilian restaurant on Cape Cod a few years ago, and way less freaky than sweetbreads.

free rice

Want something fun to do on the internet? How bout a vocab quiz? It's called "Free Rice" and it's one of those things where, if you click on something, someone donates something. But this one gives you a word to define and, depending how you answer, gives you progressively harder or easier words. And you just keep clicking...and clicking...and clicking.... So far, I top out at level 47. You? (My advantage: they think medical words are difficult.)

google

Check out this one google search that'll get you to my blog:
andswers to face books traveler iq chalenge
Wow. Well, let's see. I can't give you the answers, but I can give you this advice: learn to spell.

bawdy place

This is a relatively unremarkable-looking article about a prostitution ring being busted up, but I would like to point out that the thing people have been charged with is "maintaining a bawdy place." Bawdy. Heh heh.

thought of the day

I hate when people use "reticent" to mean "reluctant." I just looked it up in the dictionary, so I now know it's technically correct, but it totally annoys me.

desultory

Every now and then I hear a word pronounced and I'm like, oh! Just now someone said "desultory" on the radio, and I looked it up, and he was right - it is totally not pronounced the way I thought. (It's DESultory. I thought it was deSULtory. Kind of like sultry, only not.)

I can spell like nobody's business, but unfortunately this does not always carry over into pronunciation. Good thing I'm a writer and not an extemporaneous speaker, although if I was, I doubt I'd make a lot of use of the word "desultory." Shoot, just pronounced it wrong in my head again. Must correct that.