weird words

Go and watch this:

http://www.tape.tv/vid/389311

(You will probably have to go through an ad for the newest oh-so-brilliant-not-I-phone mobile. Sorry!)

Then tell me whether that's a clever homage or a cheap rip-off. Tocotronic, the German band with intellectual sensibilities, doesn't do much for me, which is mostly due to its reputation. They are being sold as clever, and all I hear is sixties guitars with German lyrics. Or it's the singer's voice, I don't know. This song is catchy enough, not quite as monotonous as some of the other songs I remember.

The video, touted on SPON as paying homage to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, certainly copies several iconic shots - the red leather jacket seems familiar, too. What does it mean though? I just don't get it.

I'm on holiday and while I've been terribly unproductive the last three days I've actually got a couple of things to do in the next two weeks. I'm writing them down now to motivate myself to actually do them.

( List and musings )

I don't work in the town where I live. This has the great advantage that I don't meet my students when I'm out.

There's always a first contact though. Monkshappyriver isn't that far away from D-village. Last Saturday when I wanted to collect my Buffy comics (they weren't in yet) at the local comic book shop I bumped into three year 9 students who wanted to get their manga fix. They were of the polite, friendly and nerdy variety and we had a very short chat in which I didn't reveal what I was trying to purchase. Maybe they'll think I just wanted to buy a postcard but I bet they asked at the counter what that lady who just left the shop had wanted. Nevermind. There's another girl in that year who knows about my Buffy fandom because we bonded over her Spike crush and she came dressed as Faith to the Carnival fancy dress party - and I recognised the costume. She's heavily into Take That at the moment though.

I'm spending entirely too much time this holiday with work. There are the test papers I have to mark, there are lessons to be planned and then there is also the distracting presence of the internet. I've just been doing a English grammar101 course - don't know why, but these interactive tests where you click on the answers just fascinate me, even when they're very very dull. I came across it while trying to find some teaching material about the play I will have to teach soon. We've recently changed to centralized exams which means that we've got set texts now and while I've been teaching most of the set texts anyway, this one is new for me and probably a fairly hard sell.

Also, this is amusing me: Someone has unearthed a Neue Deutsche Welle hit and claims it sounds a bit like the Buffy tune. I was already around when that song came out and I don't think there's much of a resemblance. Anyway, getting your information from google-translated webpages produces even more oddities. The commenters are rather amused at the lyrics as google has kindly translated the verb form "düse" from düsen, which basically means to travel or run fast and derives from compound words like Düsenflugzeug (jet plane) with "nozzle" which is a fairly accurate translation for the noun Düse which is most frequently used in compound words where it means jet. Now we're back at grammar 101. It's a bit like my students who are so happy that they're now allowed to use German-English dictionaries during tests which means that some of their sentences read like google translations. It's not really their fault that the German noun Ziel can mean destination, aim, target or goal (which again might mean something else altogether). Sometimes it takes quite a bit of time and dictionary research until I find out that looking up the verb ansprechen can produce to respond, because brakes respond and in German we use ansprechen in that context, but the word they had been looking for is actually to address or speak to someone directly. So somehow they've managed to come up with a word that has the opposite meaning of the one they're looking for. Another puzzle was the student who wrote about the second counterfoil instead of the second paragraph, because yes, Abschnitt, literally off-cut can also be the ticket stub that is returned to you after it's been checked. Mind-boggling!