Tonight I attended the prize giving ceremony of the seventh Cologne short story competition that is annually hosted by the German department of the Cologne University and that I had participated in just for fun. After reflecting for weeks over what my story should be roughly about, I typed it down in two days at [...]

In German, it is “der Bonus” and “die Boni”! It is not “der Boni”!!! Bonus = singular Boni = plural One “Bonus”, many “Boni”. Is that really so difficult??? MY GOD!!!

Urban legends – almost everyone knows a few. Most of them are so ridiculous that – provided you are blessed with an IQ higher than 50 – you can dismiss them as mental trash without further investigation of their truth content. The stories range from flesh-dissolving cola to a merely endless number of Eskimo words for “snow” through to [...]

As a matter of fact, I don’t care two figs about all the Christmas coziness, warmth, cordiality, homelikeness, love and all that stuff. That’s why I hadn’t planned anything like a “Christmas post”. But yesterday, my mother reminded me of a beautiful poem which, due to its subject, suits Christmas time very well. So let [...]

Everyone who knows me knows that I set great value upon spelling. Whether old or new German spelling rules is not that important – but you should at least command one of them. The internet has long since become a Petri dish for orthography-resistant word mutations, and time and time again, I stumble over amusing, appalling or [...]