puns

7

A German’s interpretation of my Australian pronunciation of flasher just yielded the phantom of the flesher: a guy who walks round with his coat open, flashing people with his flesh. Having cherished sundry other examples like “this cost fifty bugs” and “you have a great bump” I was reluctant to point out the error – […]

Brother has a new baby and is taking paternity leave. In the struggle over dinner to translate the concept it came out wrong & I pounced. Eternity leave! That’s when you just walk out and you’re never going back. ‘You can take this job & shove it, I’m going home to my family.’

Berliner to Brisbaner, who has urged him to cross against the lights, at peak hour, right in the middle of the city: Ah no thanks. I don’t like jail walking. Not with so many police around. Brisbaner: (folds her face into his shirt feeling the weakness of language adoration take hold.)  

Are ignorance & arrogance the same thing? I think they are. My friend and I argue. He says, ignorance goes inside, arrogance goes towards the outside. Yes I say; but as you destroy your ignorance, as you realize we are all connected and part of one another, it becomes impossible to be arrogant. (Arrogantly I […]

Favourite German-English idiomcy of the week: a friend confesses to ‘bunch-watching.’ That’s when you borrow an entire season of some tv show on dvd and watch the lot. Favourite personal neologism of the night: idiomcy. I didn’t have the right word (it’s not exactly ‘mistranslation’) and didn’t want to insult my friend’s English. As I […]

A German friend trying to understand a phone call from a Polish colleague just asked me could I stop typing… as I was rattling away at a fine old pace and it was very distracting. I learned to type on an old manual typewriter where you had to exert actual pressure to get the keys […]

I’ve a German-speaking friend who since quitting tobacco suffers terribly from grievings. ‘Grievings’ are what happens when you depend on a drug and then give it up: heroin grievings, nicotine grievings. I quit coffee in January, and today in the Lebanese shop where the machine sent out aromatic blasts and the steam collected on the […]

On the lake, ducks and ducklings, geese and goslings, and a pair of swans bobbed about with the tiny grey morsels of fluff my dyslexic ex used to call ‘swanlings.’ “Look, Oel! A mamma and a pappa swan… and all the little swanlings.”  

I have a cute, European friend who talks about money in the slang sense as “bugs.” This cost 75 bugs and the other was a steal at only 20 bugs. To talk about bucks of course makes no more sense: why would a male deer have more value than a bear, a bitch, a bison? […]

Drowsy today & introspective and I had to sort of tip myself out of the house like the last olive clinging in the jar. The market stallholders seemed to me noisy and boisterous, cheerful in an inflicted way. When I paused in front of a mound of strawberries the guy shovelled a dozen punnets into […]