Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Pölen

I have a text message invitation for tomorrow evening, encouraging pölen. This is a word unknown to Germany's finest dictionaries, and is apparently only used in the area around Essen, Bochum and Dortmund. In case you haven't guessed, pölen means to play football, and Torpedo Entenhausen have begun their summer training regime.

The geographical limit of this phrase has been somewhat found here (you may wish to put on your sunglasses before opening the link), and a quick discussion in the U-bahn revealed that the term was unknown to test subjects from Stuttgart and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

Pölen has, oddly enough, a second slang meaning. The german word for oil is Öl, and oil from plants can be called P-Öl, or Pöl for short. Sticking -en on the end creates the verb pölen, meaning to run a vehicle with vegetable oil, which is apparently all the rage in Germany due to a generous tax break.

2 comments:

perreira said...

I obviously ignored the warning at your second link and now everything is pink. So, dear innocent readers of this blog, please trust Phil's warning. Better even, try a text browser like links on a monochrome terminal while using sunglasses, just to be sure.

(The pink is slowly changing to green now...)

Dee said...

very interesting blog :)