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Translation, from Old French, translacion, first appeared in English in the 14th century, when it was used to describe the process of taking a saint's body or relics from one place to another. The city government assumes that there are likely 3,000 more.īlindgänger are part of life in Germany, part of the cost of doing excavations, part of plowing any field. In Berlin alone 7,300 Blindgänger have been removed in one of these three ways since 1947. Or,įor bombs too dangerous to lift or touch: that it is time to explode the dud right there and to rebuild whatever it destroys.
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In case the detonator cannot be removed safely, that it is time to also evacuate everyone adjacent to the transportation route, along which intrepid workers will operate machines to gently-oh-so-gently-ferry the Blindgänger to a place where it can be detonated. They mean it is time to bring in the specialists who canĭefuse a five hundred-pound, unexploded bomb from World War II. What they mean is that it's time to evacuate the entire district, including all of the folks in the nursing homes and hospitals who are hooked up to machines. When German newspapers report that a construction crew has found a Blindgänger, they don't mean that the backhoe excavator's bucket clunked against:Ī thing that fails to work properly or is otherwise unsatisfactory or worthless, orĪ venture or situation that produces no profit whatsoever, orĪ person whose behavior or attitude sets them apart from others in an uncomfortably conspicuous way. Note that any word may be a geared device. Note that any geared device can change the speed, torque, and direction of a force. The closest English translation is "gear transmission ratio." Übersetzung, in German, means "translation," but Übersetzung also signifies how two cogwheels relate to one another: the number of turns one has to take relative to the other, the fact that, if they are to move together, the smaller one will need to spin much faster than the larger one. "Besides," the teacher says, "computers will make translations automatic very soon." I try to explain to the teacher that learning a language is not mechanical, that words and phrases open doors inside the mind. I imagine wearing English like a vestment, a shawl to connote ceremony. In the late 14th century to invest meant to put on official robes.
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So, wouldn't all the time and effort that might go into learning, say, German, be better spent on more math, or shop, or sports, or on gaining greater skill in pretty much any other enterprise? After all, the teacher argues, English is spoken pretty much anywhere most of his students would ever want to go. Their schweigen is not a refusal, it is an act-not a "no" but a "yes," not a "failure" but a "win."Īn American high school teacher asks, with disarming earnestness, why I would think it important for American students to invest in learning any language other than English. In German, to silence is intransitive: something you do, but not something you can do to someone.ĭer Wald steht schwarz und schweiget, go the words of a still-popular German song, written by Matthias Claudius in 1779, about the risen moon: "The woods stand black and silent."Įxcept that these woods, in German, are not "standing silent," but they "stand and silent," as in "execute an action," and what they do, as they stand, is to emit no sound, convey no message they fail to chatter or to sing. In English, the verb to silence takes a direct object, someone or something to be shut up. Imagine if silence were something you did, instead of something you heard (or didn't hear). English remains the most beautiful of languages.