The Contempt of the Ill-Informed (or the misadventures of Mr. Testosterone)

There's this guy in my German class who I like to think of as Mr. Testosterone. Booming voice, greasy baseball cap-wearing too-cool-for-school kinda guy. Evidently this semester for him is Deutsch 101 part deux. Despite having heard all of this information once before, he can't help but comment loudly whenever our instructor's explanations are not up to his standards or when confronted with a peculiarity of the language.

Today the instructor was explaining weak masculine nouns which change in an odd way when going from the nominative case to the accusitive case. If you don't know what that means, don't worry, neither did most of the class. The point is that it's an exception, a peculiarity in the language that you just have to memorize. So Mr. Testosterone starts in on the teacher. "Oh my gawd...that is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. Why don't they change that? That's ridiculous! What a stupid language!" etc. Yes, that's correct - German is 'stupid'. Why don't they change the German language so snot-nosed punk American kids can learn it more easily?

Frau Teacher did her best to answer the honest questions coming from the other students, but I couldn't help being amazed at 1)his total lack of respect for our instructor and 2)his reaction of contempt in the face of something he didn't understand. I mean, English is way more complicated and has many more exceptions. German isn't harder or weirder, it's just different. And this guy had zero tolerance for anything different than him or from anything he knew. Scary, scary.

How do you say 'WTF' in German?

Guten Tag!

Yesterday in German class, I had occaision to wonder: how do you say 'What the f*ck??' in German?

So, I'm taking Deutsche 101, and we're learning how to describe people. Sie ist Amerikanerin! Er hat blaue Augen! It's very exciting. So my professor starts a powerpoint presentation of a variety of German cultural players and we are practicing describing them. We see (in order of the images above) director Werner Herzog, the wholesome musical group Rammstein, author and Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, and poet Gunter Grass. So, straw poll: if you saw the photos above, in response to which one would you, perhaps, guffaw? Could it be the old dude with the bushy 'stache? The latex-clad dudes wearing the codpieces?

Well, in my class, my fellow students started whooping it up in response to Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelenik. Comments included, "Oh my gawd, she's so ooooooold!", "She's the palest woman I've even seen!", and "She's so uhhhhhgly!" Just to be clear: I am not exaggerating, at least half the mostly male class was in a miniature uproar.

My poor instructor looked so confused! Are people laughing at how long the word Nobelpreisträgerin' is? No, they're laughing at the (not) ugly, (not particularly) pale Nobel Prize winner! You know, she is a chick so if she's not hot, f*ck all that writing and shit!