Wednesday, May 02, 2007

How Funny is This?


Yesterday someone left a comment on my review of the second episode of "The Tudors," which was -- if you go look at it-- about certain sex acts supposedly characteristic of the French, and the consequences of said acts on European political history. Except, of course, the comment is in German, and I can't read it. My first response was (naturally) how ill-educated I feel when confronted with German, since like many people I tried to learn it in graduate school and then switched to Spanish, a language I was more likely to use as an Americanist anyway. No matter, I thought; I'll print it out and take it to today's history department meeting, where I am sure my newly-tenured colleague in German history will do a rough sight translation for me.

Fortunately, however, embedded in the comment was a hyper-link to a website. I clicked on the link, and although I still can't read German, the pictures and the few words I do understand lead me to believe it is a site for sexual aids. Which gives me some idea of what is in the message after all. Any reader of this blog who can correct this impression is welcome to do so, of course.

And I think I will restrain myself from asking said colleague to translate the comment in a public place, although I am sure it would get the meeting started on a peppy note.

If it is what I think it is, dear reader, I wouldn't order any of that stuff if I were you, even if you do understand German. You could, however, try watching an episode of "The Tudors" and see if that does the trick.

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Update: As I understand from the more linguistically adept who took up my invitation to coment, the Germans are trying to sell some kind of oil. But why on this blog? Another blogging mystery......

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm a Dane with a basic understanding of German, and as far as I can tell that post in German has nothing to do with "sexual aids". It is an advertisement for an on-line retailer that sells different kinds of oil ("Öl (or "oel" since you can't have umlaut in a domain name) means "oil", and "Bestellung" means "order" (as in "the company has orders for several pounds of cheese")).

Anonymous said...

Oh, and by the way, it's oil as in mineral oil, meaning fuel oil, domestic heating oil, liquefied gas, bio-diesel oil and so on. Not really very exotic ;).

Paris said...

Didn't bother to look at the website, but Tad (The anonymous Dane) is correct that a spammer wants to sell you oil to heat your house, not your genitals.

Sisyphus said...

Too bad it's about biodiesel or something ... otherwise we could make smutty jokes about the "German ways" in relation to your last post. I think I'll pretend that anyways.

The Combat Philosopher said...

TR,
In cases such as this, a quick and dirty translation can be found using one of the Google Tools. This did a really nice job on the corporate web site.

It would seem to me that you got a visit from a spam bot. These bots often have few interests in historical sex habits... ;) If they get to be a pain, you can turn on post verification (drop me a line if you need instructions).

The Combat Philosopher

anthony grafton said...

Hi, I'm traveling and just checked in--anonymous is right about that post, that's the strangest spam I've seen since Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

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