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Jul 03, 2008 11:02

Because I spent my formative years wandering half-drunk around as many foreign countries as I could get to, I have always loved books and poems about travel and what it means.  One of the reasons I fell so hugely in love with Old English when I first started learning it is that they kept alive this Germanic heroic tradition of deep metaphysical ( Read more... )

randomness, old english, poetry

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muckefuck July 3 2008, 14:12:31 UTC
I don't know why we were talking about ersatzkaffee in a café in Germany, but one of the students in my programme insisted that the German word for it was "Muckefuck", which none of us--not even the waitress--had ever heard before. We thought she had munged an ordinary word like Malzkaffee ("malt coffee"--what I believe you might call "Caro" and your American readers would know as "Postum") and she was lucky to ever hear the end of the mockery.

Imagine my surprise to discover--years later--that she'd actually been in the right! Muckefuck is originally a Rhenish word, however, and although it's used in northern cities like Berlin, our programme was in the deep South where it's apparently unknown. Amused, I took it for an e-mail alias back when I was changing that on a whim every couple of months (a habit I must've picked up from my Usenet friends).

When my friend welcomerain invited me to get an account so I could read her Friends-locked entries, I never dreamed that six years later she'd be off LiveJournal completely and I'd have posted more than 10,000 comments under the name. The best reaction I've ever received for it was at an LJ-Meetup. A woman asked my username and when I said "muckefuck", she brightly replied, "I have no context for that!"

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wwidsith July 3 2008, 14:35:59 UTC
Wow! I thought there was something German going on, but I never realised it was an actual word. Fantastic...that explains the icon then..

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