As it is Christmas, todays entry will be a little bit christmassy: We are talking about Rumkugeln it seams some people like my pictures, I did a Google image search for rumkugeln , and look at these two pictures, it came up with on the first page: and: and on the second page, the search engine came up with: OK, I admit, these pictures don't seam to have something in common (a sweet, a cat and a drunk) but by the end of the day we are talking about Austrian, don't we? :) So, lets start with the Wortstamm again: Rum is rum and the best in the world is still made by the Angostura distillery located on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. And a Kugel is a ball or a sphere. So far, so clear, everybody expected that we have some Christmas-Cookies for this time. But now to the cat: what does it do? It is rolling around on the ground and happy, that life is so nice. And there is the point: rum is not only rum, no it is as well the short form of herum or in English around.
This should be a humorous guide for people learning or trying to understand the German spoken in Austria. And there are lots of problems, like Austrians make everything small in their language. And with some words they got so used to the small form, that they don’t even have a normal form for it anymore, like Eutzerl, there is no such thing as a Eutz.