Occasional musings, Geistesblitze, photos, drawings etc. by a "resident alien", who has landed on American soil from a far-away planet called "Germany".

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Word of the Month: Spaßvogel

Here’s yet another addition to the KrautBlog aviary. Spaß can mean “fun”, as in “Wir haben Spaß gehabt”(“We’ve had fun”), or “joke”, as in “Es war doch nur Spaß” (“It was only a joke”). A Spaßvogel is a droll or humorous person, one always ready to crack a joke, a wag.

Note on pronounciation. The “v” is pronounced like English “f”, not like English “v”.

[Source: Wild Things in the German Language: Kindle version | iBook version]

2 comments:

Marlene said...

@Ulrich As always, I adore the drawing. Is that a lampshade on his head? An old friend of mine used to use an expression that involved wearing a lamp shade, as in "His idea of great wit was putting a lamp shade on his head," but he always made that comment to indicate the person was not funny at all. A spassvogel, though, is someone who is truly funny right?

Is a spassvogel used to describe people who are verbally funny, because we have the expression "cut up" to describe someone who is funny in a physical way, kind of slapstick humor but I can't think of any other equivalent.

I love the menagerie and still have hopes that you might write a children's book, or in some other way collect your wonderful drawings, which I hope will keep coming.

Ulrich said...

@Marlene: I thought putting a lampshade on your head was a sign of having fun in an irreverent way, at a party. Now I have to think that I got that wrong...