Freibad

I went to a pub last night, and thought I was in for a good night when I got a bingo card. Sadly it wasn't a bingo card, but a reminder of how much I'd ordered. There are several things I didn't understand about this card.

1/ This open bookkeeping can't be in the pub's best interest. Surely either the drip-drip approach of ordering one drink after another, none of which costs much, or the drink-all-you-like-and-hand-over-your-wallet-at-the-end approach would extract more money. Being told exactly how much you've spent after every drink is rather annoying.

2/ 'Kein Eintritt' literally means 'No Entrance': You can't come in. But I was already in. Should I go out again? I decided to stay, as they probably meant 'Eintritt Frei', which is 'Entrance Free'. But they should have said so.

3/ The font used was Comic Sans, or something very similar.

4/ So there is no entrance fee, and no minimum order (kein Mindestverzehr). When did pubs in working-class towns like Bochum start expecting people to pay to go in to a pub, or tell them how much to order? It really was just a pub. No dancefloor, no DJ, nice dark furniture, a billiard table, all the usual pub stuff. The next time I go in, I will walk up to the bar, put on my best Father Dougal accent and ask "Would you like some money?", then follow up with "Is it alright if I order just the one pint, or should I start with a dozen?. I don't want to be putting you out there".

5/ What other things don't they have that other pubs don't have? No entrance fee, no minimum order, no cock-fighting, no fat naked men. Maybe it's too much psychotherapy, but why not advertise with what you do have. Freibad - Cold beer and hot food, solid dark furniture, friendly service and a bit of music. Had they said that I may have stayed for another beer.

Hocheschwindigkeitsaufnahmen

The jumble of letters in the title is almost a german word. Only almost, for, believe it or not, it is missing a letter! This word was the title of a slide during a student's talk which I was listening to today. If you insert a 'g' after the second 'h', then you have the german word for high speed photographs.

When the talk was finished, the assembled students and supervisers were asked for comments as to the style of the talk. I immediately pointed out the spelling mistake , and followed up with a tirade against the german language, which is full of words so long that a spelling mistake somewhere within the word approaches a statistical certainty.

I am worried that most of my co-workers fail to see anything odd about words with 29 letters in them. It's like english people who think that 5 days for a game of cricket is most reasonable; you can only see these things from the outside. Having grown up in a country where 28 letters is enough to make a word notorious, it is worrying to work with people who can happily throw around 29 consecutive letters without any sense of guilt or humour.

I later received a minor ticking off from a colleague who explained that the idea was for the students to do most of the analysis, which I guess was a polite way of saying to stfu. The poor student hopefully went home crying and will be emotionally scarred enough to check her slides more carefully in the future. Let this be a lesson to her: there will always be at least one annoying pedant in the audience.

Practical problems arouse.

I continued learning English this week. I know now the difference between like and such as (explained here), and between using and utilising (explained here).

Now try to analyse these sentences:

1/ Your best friend says to you

"I wish to have a girlfriend like yours."
"I wish to have a girlfriend such as yours."

The first would be a fine compliment, the second a threat.

2/ I may say

"I used my keyboard to type this sentence."
"I utilised my keyboard to beat to death the guy next to me, who is still listening to Roxette very loudly."

I now read things with a keener eye, and spotted a lovely mistake in a book about ultrasound that I'm reading:

Ideas of three-dimensional (3D) imaging of organs by beam scanning in 3D directions, was first introduced in the 50'ies, but severe practical problems arouse...

The author of the book is Norwegian and knows a lot about ultrasound, so I firmly place any blame at the hands of his publishers and their proofreader. Every time I read this sentence, I find another mistake, but the really good one is arouse instead of arose. Getting turned on by severe practical problems must be quite distracting for most scientists.