Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Lieblingsnotizbuch

The "history of Moleskine" leaflet is some of the rankest commodity fetishist marketing invented, and yet to be honest I'm quite pleased that there's apparently a specific German word for favorite notebook.

3 comments:

St. Peter's in the Great Valley said...

Hi. I found you while looking for commentary on "Spring and Fall," then enjoyed your writing style and came forward to the present.

I love the ability of Germans to make a compound word out of ANYthing. When my husband and I were newly married, we sort of acquired a German foreign exchange student - a sixteen-year-old kid who was mostly little-boy but (but? Maybe I should say "and") with the appetite of a farmer at harvest. He'd come home from school every day while we were still at work and make himself a hamburger, an indulgence we flatly couldn't afford back then.

So we told him, "Carsten, we can't buy so many hamburgers that you can eat them as a snack. Here, have these." Ramen noodles. Yum. "They cost a quarter."

To this day, we refer to ramen noodles as "quarterzoup," which is what he instantly named them. We love that guy...

Anonymous said...

Um... I left the previous comment, signing in under the wrong email address. I am not a church! (Well, I do WORK at a church. But I thought I'd switched over this account.)

Anyway... sorry!

Joanna Benskin said...

Thanks for the comment. Ha, "quarterzoup" -- that's great.