Daily Archives: Monday, January 14, 2019

  • Currywurst reaches 70

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

    Although I graduated over 4 decades ago, I still look back with fondness on the days of my modern languages degree.

    One of the absolute requirements for the award of the degree was a compulsory period of residence in countries where the languages being studied were used.

    In my instance this involved 5 months’ residency in both Perpignan (France) and Saarbrücken (Germany).

    While in Germany, I became acquainted with what would now be called German street food, including the currywurst.

    Currywurst

    Currywurst typically consists of a bratwurst cut into slices and seasoned with curry ketchup, a sauce based on spiced ketchup or tomato paste, itself topped with curry powder, or a ready-made ketchup seasoned with curry and other spices.

    It’s often served with chips.

    The currywurst reaches the grand of age of 70 this year.

    Here’s its history in brief.

    Herta Heuwer had been running a snack stall in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district since summer 1949. There wasn’t much happening on 4th September, so she had time to experiment. She mixed freshly chopped paprika, paprika powder, tomato purée and spices together. The she poured the whole lot over a fried, chopped sausage. The currywurst had been invented.

    Herta Heuwer subsequently gave her business the address of “The world’s 1st currywurst cookshop” and had the word trade mark “Chillup” (a contraction of chilli and ketchup) registered for her sauce.

    You can’t eat a proper original currywurst any more, because Herta Heuwer took the recipe to the grave with her in 1999. In 2003 a memorial plaque was put up at the former site of her snack bar. According to the German Currywurst Museum in Berlin over 800 million currywurst are consumed every year in Germany.

    To mark this culinary anniversary the Berlin State Mint has issued a commemorative coin.

    Currywurst coin front

    This commemorative coin is the sixth of a series of anniversary issues which the city mint started in 2004 and is limited to a production run of 2,500.

  • West Oxfordshire – first sighting of Brexit unicorn?

    Steve WoodsOddities, Politics

    Former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron will go down as one of the UK’s worst peacetime Prime Ministers.

    In a bid to solve a decades-old breach in his party caused by xenophobes, racists and Europhobes, he organised an “in-out referendum” on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union.

    Once the referendum came up with the wrong result, Cameron immediately ran away and left others to clear up the mes he left behind, a process at which his successor Theresa May and her ministers have failed spectacularly and serially, highlighting the shallowness of the Tory Party talent pool.

    My brother and his family have the misfortune to live in “Call Me Dave” Cameron’s former constituency of Witney.

    Even though his Witney constituency voted to remain in the EU in the MP’s disastrous referendum, there might just be changes afoot.

    A unicorn, a supposedly mythical beast, with which supporters of remaining in the EU mock the extravagant and totally unreal promises made by the Leave campaign, has appeared in one of Witney’s main shopping streets, as photographed yesterday by your ‘umble scribe.

    a papier maché unicorn spotted in Witney Oxon
    An odd stance. What’s the beast trying to do?

    The reason for the unicorn’s unusual stance is unknown.

  • Terminology still a mystery to Auntie

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Social Media

    The BBC has long boasted of the quality of its English.

    However, its reputation fort linguistic excellence has started to look very tarnished in recent years. One particular area of concern is the BBC’s failure to use the correct terminology when referring to those who work with languages (posts passim).

    Since I first wrote about this seven years ago, very little seems to have changed, as shown today by a news story posted today by a reporter with BBC Newcastle concerning the quality of language services provided to the police and courts by ITL North East Ltd. of Gateshead.

    It starts off on the wrong foot, with the headline proclaiming: “Translators were ‘not qualified’ for police interview work“.

    Translators don’t do interview work, said my mind, unless they’re working from transcripts!

    The first paragraph, however, manages to get the terminology correct:

    Unqualified police interpreters have cost the public thousands of pounds by causing court delays and in one instance the collapse of a case, the BBC has learned*.

    The error in the headline in repeated further down the piece, as follows:

    In addition to Northumbria Police, it provided translators for interviews with the Durham and Cleveland forces.

    As regards the quality of the interpreters provided the piece details several cases where unqualified interpreters had caused trials to collapse and unnecessary expenditure to be incurred. For instance, one so-called interpreter couldn’t explain the police caution in full to a suspect.

    In another instance, an “interpreter” who had just been in the country for 3 months before being recruited. She freely admitted not being able to understand everything a police officer said in an interview with a suspect.

    Since the evidence of poor quality work came to light, Northumbria Police requested a full audit of the qualifications held by all interpreters registered with ITL North East Ltd.

    The BBC should follow Northumbria Police’s example and audit the liguistic abilities of their reporters.

    For those reporters who still don’t understand the difference between translators and interprwters, I would refer them once again to my handy illustrated guide from 2013 (posts passim).

    * = As regards the phrase “the BBC has learnt…”, it has been pointed on social media out that this story was first broken the satirical magazine Private Eye over a year ago. Do keep up Auntie!