Unfortunately, pants

November 15, 2008 by Johnny

When people throw things at me and call me an uncultured shit — which happens frequently while shopping, hiking, and vomiting in public — it sometimes occurs to me that they’re wrong because I’m bilingual. Being bilingual is a rarity in today’s America, where most people don’t even speak one language, and instead manage to eke out a parody of communication through a series of grunts and gestures. 

Today, I can sort of read a German magazine and can carry on a German conversation. I can sometimes follow German TV or radio. When I lived in Luxembourg in 1998, I even watched Alf in German. Get this: the German word for Alf is “Alf.” 

It wasn’t always so rosy. I started learning German in high school, where I was taught how to tell people my name, how to ask where the disco was, and how to inquire as to whether or not Mrs. Schmidt was at home. At first, I didn’t understand everything. I didn’t get that when my teacher said “Pass auf,” she was requesting our attention rather than our unconsciousness. But it got easier, and I slugged through it. By the time I graduated high school, I was able to determine the whereabouts of the train to Berlin, what Wolfgang and Helga were doing after school, and at what time we would be invading Poland. 

So, when I got to college, I was okay but not great. I figured I’d take my required two more quarters of German language, and then begin the arduous process of forgetting all of it. 

College German required a lot of partner work, and my partner was a freshman named Jim. We were told to introduce ourselves to each other over and over and to tell each other our ages and to inquire whether or not the other liked sauerbraten. When we learned a new construction, we were told to create sentences using that construction. If we didn’t know how to say something, we were allowed to ask, but had to do it in German using the phrase ‘Wie sagt man…?”  It all made me mentally tired — as if I was going to pass auf. 

Once, deep in the midst of an assignment on relative pronoun phrases, we walked over to our T.A. to ask a question.

“Ja?” she said.

“Wie sagt man ‘pistol-whip’?”

She didn’t understand, so I pretended to beat Jim with the butt of an imaginary revolver before repeating the question.

” ‘Mit einer Pistole schlagen.’ “

Jim tried it out in German. ” ‘The man, who is wearing the blue hat, is pistol-whipping Tony Danza.’ ” He nodded. I thanked the T.A. and walked away.

More questions arose as we continued with the assignment. “Wie sagt man ‘flesh-eating bacteria’?” Jim asked later.

“Wie sagt man ‘break-dancing fiasco’?”

“Wie sagt man “David Bowie’s hairdo’?”

By the end of the session, we were turned around on the German language. We were further turned around when the T.A. brought in a popular German CD for our listening enjoyment. On the cover were four very white people in ostentatious studded sunglasses and various ridiculous hats — a hip-hop group by the name of “Die Fantastischen Vier,” or “The Fantastic Four.”

german rap

“Isn’t that a group of superheroes?” Jim asked. 

The album turned out to be brilliant, and thanks to my increased skills, I was able to easily translate the lyrics (”The Smudo, the Smudo, I am the Smudo. I don’t know Karate and I don’t know Judo.”), which made me feel smart. I took the borrowed DFF album to the deli I worked at and played it loudly and proudly. 

My boss, Ryan, was intrigued. He said that he only knew two German words. One was “dankeschön” (which he, like everyone else, mispronounced as “dunka-shane”) and the other was “lederhosen.” 

“What does that mean, anyway?” he asked.

I knew that “hosen” meant pants, but the other half of the word had me mystified. So I pulled out my dictionary and looked it up. 

“Here it is,” I told him, running my finger down the page. “It means ‘unfortunately.’ “ 

“So ‘lederhosen’ means ‘unfortunately, pants’?” he said.

“I guess.”

“As in, someone puts pants on their head instead of a hat and you point out their error by saying, ‘Excuse me, but unfortunately… pants.’ ”

I agreed that this was odd, so I asked my T.A. She was still afraid of me after the pistol-whipping incident but informed me that although “leider” did in fact mean “unfortunately,” “leder,” which was correct, meant “leather.” 

“Dunker-shane.” I told her.

Her wariness of Jim and me did not improve with time. We were scheduled later in the day to perform a dialogue for the class about a campus issue. We had chosen the oft-lamented parking problem.

“There aren’t enough parking spots here,” I began, speaking in German.

“Yes. Yes there are not,” Jim agreed.

“There should be more.”

“Yes. Yes there should.”

“What if there was less parking?”
 
“That would be unfortunately,” Jim said, capitalizing on what we had learned about leiderhosen.

“But,” I pointed out, “that would mean more room for a…” I paused, then turned to the T.A. “Wie sagt man ‘Taco Bell’?”

” ‘Taco Bell,’” she answered.

“That would mean more room for a Taco Bell,” I told Jim.

“We should no parking places, and Taco Bell make,” Jim agreed.
 
“But what of the commuters?”

Jim rubbed his chin. “They need parking places?”

“They need.”

“We could kill all of the commuters,” he suggested, nodding.

“But what would we do with the bodies?”

“We could throw them in the river.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding back. “Yes. Let us eat tacos.”

We looked to the T.A. when we had finished. After a silent pause, she slowly offered one criticism. “When you talk about throwing the bodies into the river,” she explained, “you should say ‘in den Fluß,‘ not ‘in dem Fluß.’ Using dative case implies that you aren’t throwing bodies into the river, but are instead standing in the river and tossing them around.”

“That’s what we meant,” I said.

“Like a Frisbee,” Jim added, doing a pantomime for emphasis.

By the time I went to Luxembourg, I was set. I knew how to explain my tossing of bodies. I knew about Die Fantastischen Vier. And fortunately, I knew about my unfortunate pants. Which is pretty essential to getting the attention of Germans, as it turns out. 

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Comments

37 Comments on Unfortunately, pants

  1. Anya on Sat, 15th Nov 2008 12:19 pm

    2. You owe me a new wireless keyboard; I just spewed my coffee all over it you made me choke and laugh so hard.

    Hysterically enough, this post relates to my current attempts to learn french (which is seriously impeded by my twisted south of the Mason Dixon line accent and dislike for t’s and love of adding r’s to every word). I have a phonetic phrase book and keep practicing on my already-knows-French husband (which sounds kinky but is really very PG). Every time something comes out of my mouth he gets this horrified look on his face. Either I’m also throwing bodies in the river for the sake of Taco Bell, or my accent really is that atrocious.

  2. Mad Asthmatic on Sat, 15th Nov 2008 2:08 pm

    3. When i stop laughing I may be able to think of something sensible to say. The post has reminded me of my French Oral exam when I told the examiner I had murdered my parents – I was 16 at the time, hated French with a passion and was generally a horrible student. The examiner’s face was a picture! i got into a bit of trouble of it though – early morning detention for 3 weeks – ouch, but it was sooooo worth it.

    MA

  3. Paradise @ lastminuteacademic.blogspot.com on Sat, 15th Nov 2008 4:50 pm

    4. Fucking awesome!!! x

  4. Margaret (Nanny Goats) on Sun, 16th Nov 2008 2:30 am

    5. You are awesomeness incarnate!

    In my high school German class, we learned where Monica was and asked Otto if the post office was open. (Nein, sie ist am Samstag geschlossen). It is also where I met a boy whom I would marry some twenty years later.

  5. Rick(AQS) on Mon, 17th Nov 2008 7:05 am

    6. Haha, I took 4 years of German in high school … this made me LOL many times. Body tossing, FTW!!! It’s funny how I can’t speak even the simplest sentences anymore, yet I can still understand(for the most part) the spoken language when I hear it in movies.

  6. Mishi on Mon, 17th Nov 2008 11:31 am

    7. Hi Johnny,

    I found you through Chuck’s forums. I just wanted to say hi, because each time I’ve stopped by you’ve made me laugh. I learned german in middle school, but I have to say I never constructed such fun sentences during any of my classes!

    Just wanted to say that I love your writing style, and thanks for the inappropriately loud laughing fit I had during work, while reading this.

  7. Johnny Truant on Mon, 17th Nov 2008 12:51 pm

    8. Ha, thanks to everyone. The trick to learning a language is to keep it bizarre and use phrases that are more common to your everyday experience than the ones given in the primers, like “hot chicks with douchebags.” This has the added benefit of horrifying instructors, though I think MA takes home the prize for best assertion to an authority figure.

    AQS – Have you seen Das Boot in the original German? I swear watching that repeatedly is how I learned most of what I actually know and can remember.

  8. thesharkguy on Mon, 17th Nov 2008 4:23 pm

    9. Oh my.

    When I lived in Germany, I happened upon The A-Team….which was called “Das A-Team’ appropriately enough…

    Married with Children, was ‘Eine Schrecklich Nette Familie’, a ‘terribly nice family’, which is a fun play on words…
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpIvvU9XYYk

    Why does everyone call Das Boot, ‘boot’ like in shoe? It’s pronounced ‘boat’. Maus is mouse, Haus is house and Boot is Boat. Sheesh.

  9. Johnny Truant on Tue, 18th Nov 2008 8:04 am

    10. I’m pretty sure I ran into MWC, but not Das A-Team. I definitely remember watching the James Bond movie Golden Eye there in its entirety with my host family. I’m pretty sure I didn’t understand enough to truly follow the dialogue, and instead that I assembled a facsimile of understanding from watching the visual, hence making myself feel smarter than I was.

  10. Tracy on Tue, 18th Nov 2008 2:42 pm

    11. Hilarious! I moved to Germany as a child, unfortunately my first German teacher was a Romanian with a very scary voice and no sense of humor at all about transitives. I can still understand German but just thinking about trying to conjugate a verb leaves me a quivering, mute mess.

  11. Melissa on Tue, 18th Nov 2008 3:30 pm

    12. *dies laughing*
    This reminds me of my french classes as well. We came up with some really weird phrases that probably weren’t gramatically correct, but it was fun none the less.
    This makes me want to take up french again.

    I also had a roommate for a while who wanted to learn German. I bought him one of those ten minutes a day series on German. It has stickers and flash cards in it, and next thing I know, my entire apartment is covered in yellow stickers with German words. He started talking to me in German all the time. He was trying to do it to aggrivate me, but I ended up knowing what he was talking about because we knew each other so well. =)

  12. lastminuteacademic on Wed, 19th Nov 2008 4:30 pm

    13. Thing is, my friend did that with Icelandic. But who the hell wants to learn that????

  13. Delmont88 on Wed, 19th Nov 2008 4:33 pm

    14. I studied four years of German in high School and after graduation, took a six week backbacking trip to Germany. My first real encounter with a German went well enuf “Wo ist die Bahnhof?” if I’m remembering it correctly.
    My second encounter with a German, well, not so cheerful.

    I was sound asleep on a train, headed to France, I think…when our cabin door swung open at like 2 am, and all I saw were German uniforms. then they started barking at us in German “Stehen Sie auf. Erhalten Sie Ihre Papiere! Macht Schnel!”

    Having heard stories from my family about WW2, my mind started wandering.
    They made us get off the train, without our luggage, half asleep, and sit in a little building for a few minutes.

    Come to find out, they were just border guards. We were sleeping in the car that was headed for Italy, when our tickets were for Paris.

    They were being nice to the dumb Americans and I thought we were going to die.

  14. Johnny Truant on Thu, 20th Nov 2008 6:48 am

    15. When I was there, an American passport was like gold. The border guards would hassle everyone, but they’d take one quick glance at our passports and move along politely. The Turkish guys really got it. Guess you can’t be middle eastern anywhere except the middle east.

  15. Peter on Wed, 26th Nov 2008 11:58 am

    16. Funny stuff.

    This reminds me of the only sentence I know in spanish which translates to “pardon me, but where is the nearest taxidermist? I’m in a hurry!”

  16. The Economy Isn’t Happening » Blog Archive » I’m selling a book, and I have a question on Mon, 1st Dec 2008 7:12 pm

    17. [...] It’s a collection of 30 of my best posts in tangible form including the classics “Unfortunately, Pants” and “The 2008 Election Results Are In!” (as the only one with photos). The idea [...]

  17. Hiro Boga on Tue, 2nd Dec 2008 3:17 pm

    18. You are a funny and subversive man! In both languages! Thanks for the belly laugh. :-)

    Hiro

  18. Monica on Mon, 15th Dec 2008 2:03 pm

    19. I’m jealous. Your humor puts my humor to shame.

    So much that part of me thinks you are making this up, (real life shouldn’t be this funny!!) but then I recognize that your life, like mine, resembles a sitcom.

    Give me more!!!!!

  19. Zoe on Tue, 16th Dec 2008 9:06 am

    20. While trying to read this post aloud, I discovered that I’m apparently incapable of saying the phrase “unfortunately, pants” without bursting out laughing and subsequently becoming completely unintelligible.

    I simply must learn German now.

  20. Johnny Truant on Tue, 16th Dec 2008 2:33 pm

    21. Lucky for you, Zoe, I find that “unfortunately, pants” almost NEVER comes up in my day-to-day conversation.

  21. Coral M on Wed, 17th Dec 2008 5:44 pm

    22. My husband raced up from the other end of the house…he thought I was crying (also he was concerned that I would wake the sleeping child)!
    Am following you on Twitter now…to help you achieve your goal.

  22. Johnny Truant on Wed, 17th Dec 2008 5:48 pm

    23. But you didn’t tell us what you are actually doing. So, I’m going to assume you were milking an animal. I’m guessing cow or goat.

  23. dijisoul on Mon, 22nd Dec 2008 9:23 pm

    24. hilarious

  24. The Economy Isn’t Happening » Blog Archive » Bits and Pieces: Christmas edition on Tue, 23rd Dec 2008 10:14 am

    25. [...] submitted two posts to Ezine Articles. One was “Unfortunately Pants” and the other was”Christmas is Gay.” The first went through with no problem, but [...]

  25. Detlef Cordes on Wed, 14th Jan 2009 11:24 am

    26. “Körperschmeißen im Wasser” is for Germans what baseball is for Americans. If you manage to throw your husband at least 7 feet upstream in the river you win a Lederhose.

    Throwing 7 feet downstream you win eine Fahrt im Bagger durch die Eiffel – mit Blaulicht und Sirene.

  26. Johnny Truant on Wed, 14th Jan 2009 2:23 pm

    27. Yeah, don’t think we didn’t laugh our asses off when we saw the conjugation of fahren.

    “So it becomes… ‘fahrt’?”

    “Yes.”

    “And how is that pronounced?”

  27. Detlef Cordes on Wed, 14th Jan 2009 3:08 pm

    28. And a failed fart is a Butterfahrt (Toll free shopping spree by boat into extraterritorial waters to buy e.g. butter).

  28. Brandy on Fri, 23rd Jan 2009 11:49 pm

    29. Lmao! “Yes. Let us eat tacos.” Freakin awesome.

  29. Kim on Sun, 8th Feb 2009 8:58 pm

    30. SOOOOO many lolz.

    Linked to. Hope you don’t mind. If you do, unfortunately, pants.

  30. Maddie on Mon, 9th Feb 2009 12:13 am

    31. Your blog may be the best thing I have come across since once monthly birth control. I laughed so hard. Thank you for that!

  31. Johnny Truant on Mon, 9th Feb 2009 2:07 pm

    32. Thanks to the recent folks!

    I also enjoy, Kim, the implication that I might mind being linked to. NO! DON’T YOU DARE FUCKING SEND ANYONE MY WAY! I swear, if this results in an increase in book sales, I’m going to hunt you down.

  32. Terry Heath on Wed, 11th Feb 2009 5:37 pm

    33. You just put my entire college experience into perspective.

    Being a vocal major, I had to sing tons of songs in German. Some of them were called “Leider”. Wikipedia says, “Typically, Lieder are arranged for a single singer and piano. Sometimes Lieder are gathered in a Liederkreis or “song cycle”—a series of songs (generally three or more) tied by a single narrative or theme.”

    And we all know Wikipedia is THE authority site.

    So anyway, now that I know that the word “leider” means unfortunately, next time I ever have to sing one of those German art songs and someone asks me, “What was that?” I can confidently reply: “Unfortunately, songs.”

  33. Johnny Truant on Wed, 11th Feb 2009 5:47 pm

    34. I hate to be a ballbuster by giving a factual answer to your dilemma, but the German word for “song” is actually “Lied,” thus proving that neither Germans nor their language make sense. (Another example: The word for “poison” is “Gift,” so you could totally tell your wife that you were going to give her evil mother a gift and then laugh about it.)

    But I do like the expanding implications here:

    LEDERHOSEN = Leather pants
    LEIDERHOSEN = Unfortunately, pants
    LIEDERHOSEN = Song pants (which probably go well with rainbow suspenders)

  34. Terry Heath on Thu, 12th Feb 2009 10:36 am

    35. Ah. The old dyslexic dilemma strikes again. Actually, I’m not dyslexic; I am actually “lysdexic” which is of course the total opposite. I have been know, however, to give driving directions totally backward without even knowing it. I’ll tell someone to go to the end of the road and turn right, while I’m gesturing and pointing to the left, then I’ll say take the next left and of course point to the right. They usually just nod and drive off, waiting until I’m out of sight before pulling over and asking someone else for directions.

    So anyway, back to our example, ie: our unfortunate spelling error.

    Oops.

  35. Catlin on Sun, 1st Mar 2009 7:21 pm

    36. Just discovered your site…better late than never.

    I studied my sophmore year (1985!) and also had a study buddy. =This= study buddy was from Japan and was learning her 5th! language. The skit we decided upon was (however you say this in German) ass measurements. She measured mine and said the horizontal measure out loud. =I= measured hers and added a foot. Needless to say, we aced our skit.

  36. Chef Keem on Wed, 25th Mar 2009 12:31 pm

    37. As a long-time German (make that “Bavarian”, native, 59, Austin, TX transplant), I’m glad to present you with the gift of “bringing it all together” for you:

    Liederhosen (song pants; “musical” pants) are Lederhosen (leather pants; expensive, unfortunately!) worn during frequent bouts with Weisswurst-induced flatulence of the 1 – 3 seconds kind. In a perfect world, these short “song excerpts” impress your neighbor(s) at the beer garden table with an uncanny resemblance to the first notes of the sacred “Bayrischer Defiliermarsch” (Wow – “defile”! No, can’t be…), the “Lustig’n Holzhackerbuam”, or similar tunes from the voluminous “bowels” of popular Bavarian folk music.

    P.S.: My Texan buddies almost missed their correct Autobahn exit while translating the “Ausfahrt” sign. (And, they almost defiled their khakies…oh, boy – I could go on and on!)

    Thanks for the laughs, Johnny.

  37. Johnny B. Truant on Thu, 26th Mar 2009 6:10 am

    38. Thank you, Chef. You wouldn’t believe the adolescent fun we had in high school when we realized that there was a form of “fahren” that conjugated as “fahrt.”

    Us: “How’s that pronounced?”

    Teacher: “You know, same as any ‘ihr’ form.”

    Us: “How’s it pronounced?”

    Teacher: ” ‘Fart.’ ”

    Us: “Hee-hee!”

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