Monday, November 13, 2006
Gone Phishing
Sitting in my chair, wondering how to entertain you, eager readers, this email has arrived.
You know those phishing emails you receive from alleged banks, asking you so very kindly to fill in your personal details, as part of their records updating process?
Well, those are totally wasted on me, as I am not a sucker, and I always delete these with a yawn.
"Why don't people just get a life instead of wasting their days and nights online?", I wonder as I blog...
But today, I got this:
Seeing the name of the bank, I actually thought it was an email from the Volkswagen garage, where my beetle is now recuperating from the CPR she got from The JohnnyB.
Then I noticed with impressive perception that it was written in German, and then I noticed that though I do not understand a word, the format is identical to any other phishing Email.
Now, The JohnnyB is kinda multi-lingual. He requests tea in fluent English, speaks pretty good German, breaks his teeth over several words in French, curses profusely in Arabic and highly amuses my family with Hebrew. So, he was kind enough to translate this crucial message for me, and I got captivated by the word kundendaten.
It means 'customer data'.
In German, says The JohnnyB, you can basically concatenate words together to create new terms, and change the whole meaning towards the end. In fact, Mark Twain, in his blog "The Awful German Language", says that "some German words are so long that they have a perspective". (That guy should blog more often, I tell ya).
My lead comment on my blog promises profound thoughts, and so I ponder:
This German language gymnastics is very similar to the American sincere heartfelt phrases, such as "let's-do-lunch-sometime", or "that-is-so-interesting", or "talk-to-you-later", or "I-would-love-to-stand-here-and-chat-with-you-but- - - ", where the last word rotates the interpretation by varying degrees of degrees, leaving us foreigners quite perplexed.
Gute Nacht, liebe Leser.
Und vergessen nicht, mein Ads an zu klicken.
Labels: Languages
# posted by Nava @ 8:43 PM 
Comments:
Post a Comment
Post a Comment
<< Home
