Thursday 26 November 2009

Vienna Sausages

The use of "wiener" in America is one of the many examples of how Germanic American culture really is.

Anyway, male genital mutilation is no more acceptable than female genital mutilation. Shame on Austria's Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, that it has taken the latest political vehicle of the Third Lager to point this out.

7 comments:

  1. All right, you win: we're German.

    Today on Thanksgiving Day, we Americans are eating the classic German meal of turkey, cranberries, and pumpkins. And we are commemorating our ancestors, the Germanic Mayflower pilgrims, who sailed from their German homeland and landed at Cape Cod (or Kap Kabeljaus, as we really call it here in Neues Deutschland).

    We are so German that we even use the metric system in our daily lives -- something no English people would ever do. The willingness to abandon handy customary measure for something merely systematized is the mark of a true German, don't you agree?

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  2. "our ancestors, the Germanic Mayflower pilgrims"

    The ancestors of almost none of you.

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  3. The Thanksgiving Dinnner is no more English than it is German. Quite a small minority of people in America is of English descent. But most white Americans, Protestants especially, have at least some German in them. Often hardly anything else.

    Keep up the fight on MGM.

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  4. New England has lots of Puritan descendants and few Germans. You're forgetting that America is really a land of regions.

    As for Thanksgiving dinner, it's American -- period. Even after being copied into Canadian culture in the mid-19th Century as Canadian Thanksgiving.

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  5. As an abolsute figure, my point stands.

    There has been very little migration to America from this side of the Irish Sea since before independence, whereas there was enormous German migration in the nineteenth century.

    Apart from place names changed in 1917 (and there are still some of them left intact), American culture fully reflects this.

    Including in New England, which is probably at least as German as it is English, and certainly not much less so. Why not? What's the problem?

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  6. A lot of people in New England may like to think or pretend that they are of Puritan descent but hardly any of them really are.

    The British public is finally seeing through the old lie that the Americans are somehow our kith and kin whom we therefore have to follow into every insane war while allowing them to extradite our citizens on grounds that they would not permit for us to extradite theirs.

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  7. Bob, you're wrong about New England having few Puritan descendants. I live here, and I know the place well enough. Have you ever visited?

    As for Americans being your kith and kin, though -- no, I wouldn't have said that, and I don't think I did.

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