Back to New York

Today I flew back to New York (more specifically, Newark). Before I left Amsterdam, I enjoyed my first full-body scan.

The flight was amazing. I got an aisle seat, plus an empty seat next to me, and I worked the whole way. Too good to be true!

Newark Airport Looked Almost Pretty Today

A flight attendant even gave me a pile of chocolate and cookies from first class. I don’t usually eat that stuff, but on planes and in airports all food discipline and habits are broken.

I did pages and pages of my German Vocabulary book on the flight. I really like it, although some of the transitional text—as I have mentioned before—is pretty silly. I read in a chapter entitled “Health” that “Just like Americans, Germans are very health-conscious.” Which Americans are we talking about?

I also read, “The remedy for illness and disease is treatment.” This writer has not heard of preventive medicine, I guess.

Speaking of health, when people sneeze, I always say Gesundheit (which is German for “health”) rather than “Bless you.” I prefer to keep my sneezes secular.

Exciting vocabulary I learned on the flight: “diarrhea” is Durchfall, which seems to be a combination of “through” (durch) and “fall” (Fall).” If so, appropriate! And literal! 

I also went through a chapter on numbers. One of the things I find interesting about language study is the way differences pop up in places you don’t expect them. Things like the fact that decimals in Germany (and many other countries) are formed with commas, not periods, and that with large numbers you put a space or a period between thousands—not the commas you see in English.

Heading Home from Newark: AirTran Reminds Me of a Disneyland Ride

For example, 0.3 in English would be 0,3 (null Komma drei) in German. And an American 5,000,000 would be 5 000 000 or 5.000.000. Although I see these things in documents from overseas, I don’t really register the differences somehow. It is very hard for me to replicate the German number-punctuation practices, because they violate my longstanding sense of what a number actually is.

After numbers came the “Clothing and Fashion” chapter, where I learned that “panties” are Schlüpfer. Amusingly, that is a singular masculine noun. I am pretty sure I never learned how to say “panties” in my German lit classes at Harvard. Schlüpfer is a very unsexy-sounding word, by the way. So is “bra”: Bustenhalter, which, unless I am mistaken, means “bust holder.” Like diarrhea, very literal.