Funteresting – Episode 1

Alright people, time to start with my blogging event – which I planned to host every Saturday. The topic is – funteresting thing of the week. And it’s now Saturday in my part of the world! So the wait is over and here’s the first post to kick start the event.

Hmm, so you may have already read it or want to know what it’s about on the event details page  There are lots of things to write about and some examples are on that page. The idea is to share something that you found funny and interesting.

What did I find in my week? Well, it’s a word that I learnt in the German language. The word itself was known to me since a few months now, but I found that I fitted the description so well in this week!

Now one thing that I must tell you about the German language is – it has a word for everything imaginable! Where you would need to use ten words in English to explain something, you could replace them with a single German word! (And it does help that in that language, you can concatenate any number of words to make one really long word…).

Back to my story – before I tell you the word, I have to tell you the events which led me to think that I might be the one for whom this word must have been coined for. So on Friday, that is yesterday, I had a series of what you might call “unfortunate incidents”. It started with me burning the food because I forgot about it, then running and scattering things in an attempt to rescue the non burnt portions for I was in no mood to cook again. Oh it’s just the warming up part.

After that got over, then in an attempt to clean up some space on my mobile, I wanted to delete some photos. And guess what I did? I deleted one whole album – by mistake, as one would call it, with no chance of recovery (which a lot of frantic search on the internet revealed).

Moving on, I thought probably my brain is tired and a tea ought to fix it. So I made a big cup of tea and brought it to the bedroom. Thought of checking something on the laptop, as the tea was too hot to drink. So just kept the tea on the bed on a notebook (I could have kept it at another place but you know, it was just not the day for that). Took a few sips and again went back to working on the computer and got so engrossed that I forgot about the tea and the next I saw, the tea was spilled all over the sheet! Another frantic attempt – now to rescue the mattress! Phew……….I was so exhausted by this time that I finally decided to not touch another thing and quietly go to sleep.

So now what word comes to your mind? I guess “clumsy”, “butter-fingers”, “careless” to name a few. But none of them have the same ring as the German word “tollpatschig“. Say it aloud – toll + paat + schig – and you’ll know what I am talking about.

According to an article I read, patsch means something like “splat”; the sound you hear when a flying pigeon does its business on your head and “toll” means “terrific” or “great”. So the author put two and two together to conclude that “tollpatschig” would mean “terrifically splatty” and that fits to a really clumsy person, or in my case, applies letter by letter to me on some days! So doesn’t this word immediately bring an image to your mind of what would a tollpatschig be like? When I think of clumsy, I can somehow only think about a person’s fingers being not in his/her control but with the word “tollpatschig”, somehow I can imagine all possible situations – fingers, feet, head – all inclusive!

So with that, yours truly would end her story here. If you have something along the theme (fun and interesting) to share, then don’t wait – just write it down and put a pingback to this post or put the link to your post in the comments section and let’s all have a good laugh as the weekend starts.

You can respond in a new post with a reference link to this one.
https://reflectionsontheriver.wordpress.com/2015/08/01/funteresting-episode-1.

Looking forward to your comments and entries. Have a nice weekend!!

P.S. If you are in the mood to learn some other interesting German words, from where I got to know this one, you can find the article here.