Who needs the land of the free when you have the land of the efficient? Following on from the world’s first automated restaurant, did you know that Real has opened ‘The Future Store’? No, you don’t get to shop on hovercrafts or buy or your meal in convenient pill form (although they do have ‘Roger the Real Robot’ to help out shoppers gone astray).

Basically, you head into the Future Store with your Handy , which you then use to scan the barcodes of your Joghurt or Schokolade or what have you. Then at the till your clever mobile phone tallies up your purchases and you pay electronically. Move over George Jetson!

Although my interest is usually sparked by matters of a linguistic nature, my first thought when I discovered the world’s first automated restaurant was: “That is, like, SO totally German!” No waiters, no bad service, no need to tip. You order your food from a computer and it is delivered to you via a complex system of tracks and rails. And for the busy German businessman, why he can even send emails and SMS while waiting for his meal to arrive. Now that is Effizienz. BBC have recently reported on it, you can watch the video here.

Another interesting thing about the restaurant is its name - ’s Baggers. It is complete gobbledygook in English. Maybe a German native speaker could shed some light on the seemingly strange choice of name?

Image © ‘s Baggers

A word you may not be familiar with is sitt, which is satt’s liquid equivalent, meaning one’s thirst has been quenched. Makes sense to me! Hungrig - satt, durstig - sitt.

Are you reading this, English language?

So I put in my two cents (or gave my mustard, as the Deutschies say) about German as a modular language.

But that was about verbs. Mmm, yes. Nouns (of the compound variety), in German, are a completely different (and somewhat maligned - by Englischers at least) phenomenon. Mark Twain wrote an essay called “The Awful German Language,” (take it easy, Mark!), and opined that “Some German words are so long that they have a perspective.” Clever chap.

Back in High School German class (big shout out to Mrs. R at Tauranga Girls’ College), we were taught that one of the longest words in German was Geschwindigskeitsbegrenzung (speed limit). But nooooooooo. There are -MUCH- longer.

The longest, and indeed, the most ridiculous, that I could find was Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft

That is 80 letters of sweet sweet German goodness. It was the name of a Viennese club before the war; literally translated: “association of subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services”. Although it seems like a bit of a stretch to me (could Germans possibly be capitalising on the modularity of their language? No way!), there exist many more. In fact, when the need for a new word arises, the Germans don’t invent one, they just bang two existing words together! Effizienz, much?

A prize awaits any reader (surely we must be up to at least six now) who can outdo 80 letters!

The chen has given us gifts such as Brötchen (bread roll - ‘little bread’) Entchen/Schweinchen/Hündchen (baby duck/pig/dog). But I have discovered that it can be liberally and successfully applied to all manner of words to funk them up a little: Have you tried a Bierchen, Kaffeechen, or my personal invention, the Vodkachen (great Feierabend drink, for recipe email me[at]miss-verstaendnis.com)?

And last but most cetainly not least “Tschüßchen!”(try saying it 10 times fast), as illustrated by the (in)famous YouTube video seeking emo friends (auf Deutsch!)

So, although I have enough emo friends, I wish you all a Tschüßchen - for now.

Miss V, in a follow-up to her prefixation, muses on the lack of convenient acronyms in the German language.

Abbreviations make life so much easier. I mean, why bicycle around when you can bike? Why go to the trouble of saying celluar phone when you can just use your cell?

My good friend Herr Versteh-a-lot (who, like myself, is Deutschily challenged) has introduced me to the “abbrev.” (of course you have to abbreviate ‘abbreviation’!) for the German-speaking world.

So now we catch the ‘Ube’ (pronounced: ‘uub’) to a party instead of the U-Bahn, apologise for bumping into a stranger at the party with a quick ‘Schuldi!’ – much faster than Entschuldigung. And when you leave the party, it’s with a friendly “Tschüssi!” (although that’s not really an abbrev, but it’s kind of fun.)

It remains to be seen if these little kurzies will catch on among the Deutschies. But for now, they have their place in Deutschlisch!

Tschüssi!

Miss V adheres to the German ‘Genauigkeit’ (preciseness) by measuring the EXACT distance from her office to the U-Bahn.