Concepts difficult to explain to a high-school exchange student from Germany:
1. marching band competitions
2. asparagus
3. "fastidious" vs. "meticulous"
4. which cars can be called "creampuffs" and which cannot
5. Groundhog Day
6. "swashbuckling"
7. eggplant ("Does it look like an egg? What does it taste like?")
8. Why Ranch dressing is neither "gravy" nor "sauce"
9. football (the American kind)
10. the oom-pa music at the German restaurant ("Do Americans really think Germans listen to that?")
4 comments:
Try explaining light beer.
It is as though we are different species.
Also "Hogan's Heroes." He was laughing at my pronunciation of certain German words and I explained that what little German I know came from many childhood hours spent watching "Hogan's Heroes." Try explaining THAT to a German teen.
I once listened while two painfully typical American tourists attempted to explain why the dolphins seen from the side of the Aran Island ferry illicited their reaction of awe to two 20-something Irish lads fresh from a pub at 10 a.m.
The Irish response? "Beut their jist feckin' porpoises." (I'm not exactly Charles Chestnutt or Mark Twain where dialect writing is concerned, but you get the drift.)
Also, try to relate the meaning of the song "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights" to a Russian sometime.
Surely we all know by now that Germans listen to Rammstein? =)
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