berliner

bilby commented on the word berliner

Thanks WeirdNET. Also a jam-filled doughnut made famous by John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" and the fascinating, humorous urban legend that has grown up around this line.

December 1, 2007

sionnach commented on the word berliner

Well, sometimes Wikipedia is even more annoying than Weirdnet. when I lived in Berlin, all of my German friends agreed that Kennedy's inclusion of the indefinite article was incorrect, albeit unimportant.

Also, I'm not sure I would classify this as an urban legend - there is no dispute about what he actually said.

Regional and temporal variation in The naming of baked goods is an issue I'm not going to touch with a ten-foot pole. In 1974, in Westphalia, "Berliner" did mean jelly doughnut, but by now the meaning could have morphed to "a snail-shaped contraceptive device to be used by men".

December 1, 2007

bilby commented on the word berliner

I tried this on a few people when I lived in the former East Germany and generally they opined that Kennedy had not said he was a jelly doughnut. The video footage of the speech appears to bear this out as the crowd do not roll about laughing when he says it. Not like I did when I first heard it :-) In any case, the fact that there's a reasonable amount of interest in what he implied - we know what he said - so many years later means that it has attained legendary status.

Unfortunately there have been a few Presidents since then who really were jelly doughnuts and did not have the grace to admit it.

December 1, 2007

trivet commented on the word berliner

More here.

December 1, 2007

chained_bear commented on the word berliner

I did not know this was considered an urban legend. Very interesting reading--thanks.

Also, bilby, I love your last comment, "a few presidents since then..." Too right.

December 1, 2007

sionnach commented on the word berliner

I agree that "ich bin ein Berliner" has attained legendary status. Occasionally the History Channel (aka the Hitlery Channel) or the Discovery Channel will run a program about the history of Berlin from 1945 onwards, always including the clip of that JFK speech - it remains extraordinarily moving, even after repeated viewing. And Berliners still retain a huge amount of residual good will towards Americans to a degree that would be hard to find anywhere else in Europe.

I have a particular soft spot for the city and its people, having worked there every summer while I was in college and studied there for a year, living just two blocks from the Wall. The only book of Leon Uris that I ever found even halfway palatable was the one about the Berlin airlift - generally I found his insistence on couching all his stories in crudely broad-brush, good guy/bad guy terms irritating and reductive. In the case of the Berlin airlift it didn't seem completely inappropriate though.

Ooh, I could go for a currywurst right about now.

December 1, 2007

reesetee commented on the word berliner

Trivet, funny video! :-) I'd always heard it had to do with whether the article "ein" was used before the word. On the other hand, why it should become such a legend when Jimmy Carter's mistranslated "carnal lust" episode hasn't is beyond me. ;-)

December 2, 2007

sionnach commented on the word berliner

Ich bin ein irrer Ire.

December 2, 2007