Austrian for foreigners

As you know, Austrians are very friendly people. Part of being friendly is to have manners. Having manners includes that you greet. You also know, that Austrians are super-efficient. As such, they have multi-purpose words: You can use the same word in multiple situations. One of these words is Servus. The word comes from the Latin servant of slave. According to Wikipedia "The phrase is an ellipsis of a Latin expression servus humillimus, domine spectabilis , meaning "[your] most humble servant, [my] noble lord." No subservience is implied in its modern use, which has the force of "at your service." Servus is the origin of the word serf ." - But that sounds very complicated. Servus is great, because you can use it to say Hi when you meet somebody. You can use it when you cheers with somebody. You can use it to say Good Bye. Or to put it with the words of the late and great Peter Alexander:  Every city has their own  parting words; in Paris you ...

This is just an administrative message, in case you have not read the update on Google Friend connect here: http://buzz.blogger.com/2015/12/an-update-on-google-friend-connect.html Basically, Google Friend Connect should be a way to easily follow blogs. I cannot comment on this, as I never got it to work. https://www.google.com/friendconnect/admin/site/setup always came up with some strange error messages. In theory, once should have been able to able to log into Friend Connect with a number of accounts, including Twitter, Yahoo, Orkut or other OpenId providers and then use this Friend Connect account to follow blog content. Please, if somebody is using this tool from Google, could you please post in the comments section your experience with it? Update from the 19th of January As I did not get feedback in the comments, I will post the Google Help text here: Manage blogs you follow You can read the latest posts on your favorite blogs by adding them to the reading list on...

Today, we don’t talk about an indigenous, Austrian word. But it is great. So I could not resist. We are talking about the Deppenzepter . If you Google the word , you may not find that many hits, yet. Let’s do the normal thing and dissect the word. It consists of the German Depp which could be translated as idiot, fool or joker. As well as the work Zepter which is scepter, sign for the king. Or better the Joker, as in this playing card: To get an idea about the meaning of the word, think about the last time you were somewhere nice and you nearly got beaten by a person with a stick. Never happened to you? That’s just because the person did it unintentionally. And the stick was sophisticated with a phone on the other end! Does it start to make sense? As an image tells more than a thousand words, let’s place a great phone from a guy with a Deppenzepter here: Thanks Heise Foto for the great article! Homework: Please have a healthy laugh about people making selfies, espec...

Austrians have an obsession with cleaning windows. Cleaning, or better clean places, in general. But cleaning windows especially. Being born and raised here I never even thought of that this could be out of the normal, but today I realized that this must an Austrian special obsession. I only realized that today. We have lived a year in the Caribbean , where I wanted to get the windows of our apartment cleaned. Every maid told me that they “don’t do windows”. So I tried to clean the windows myself, which produced not the result – spotless clean windows – I wanted due to the burglar proving. I looked up professional cleaning companies which all responded with dismay to my request of cleaning windows – or better having clean windows. Today, first meeting of the cleaning lady in Austria and she insist of cleaning the windows – which look spotless to me. Which reminded me of some discussions on a popular social networking site where some of my friends dissed some of my other friends, beca...

Today, I found a great resource on Facebook: smoonr They are talking about a great phrase: "Na no na net!" which is the Austrian phrase for "Yes!". You may have learned in school that a double negative is a bad grammar, but you know, we are talking about Austrians: what is a rule not to to do somewhere else is endorsed here. Kaffeepause? #nanonanet #wortschatz Posted by smoonr on Monday, April 13, 2015

I hope after todays posting you don’t say about it: “ Des is Holler! ” “ Holler ” is “ Hollunder ” in Hochdeutsch and “ elder ” or “ elderberry ” in English; the scientific name for the plant is “ Sambucus nigra”  - Now, please don’t tell anybody, that I am not specific! :) And here you have a pretty picture of an elderberry flower, once again powered by Wikipedia. I have fond childhood memories collecting the flowers with my mummy and producing the syrup together afterwards. I like elderberry flower juice; and as I am not the only one liking it, there is commercial supply for the syrup these days as well: In case the flowers are not cut off, the plant can build a fruit, which then looks like this: The elderberry plant is a strong plant, it is close to impossible to kill it once it grows and it grows close to everyw...

Did you see the news? Austria won the Eurovision Song Contest. Find all details on the website of the BBC . Last time Austria won the Sing Contest was 38 years ago with this great song: If you want to see past entries about this please go to that section of the blog .