About antique German steins...

I enjoy history, and as a strange pastime, I like looking at antique beer steins on eBay - because to me they represent a unique window into a time and place when people were enjoying themselves. Here is a fun stein I thought I would share with our crowd. Made in 1902:




The saying on the stein is classic:

The nicer the pub
The worse for the wife.
The worse the wife,
The nicer the pub.

 

Put another way -

An unhappy wife
makes for great pub life.

 

German stones?

That's a Maß.

 

Do they still use the scharfen s (Eszett)?? I thought they pretty much did away with it.

 

I still see it in modern writing...

 

Yes they still use it... as well as umlauts. Try this for fun: make sure your num lock is on, and hold down the alt key while typing 0223 on the num pad.

Did you know a scharfes s is never used at the beginning of a word?

 

It's been over 40 years since my last German class but yeah, I knew that. It would look funny and they'd lose their reputation as stern, weird-joke-telling, industrious volk.

I know all the keypad shortcuts for español und Deutsch. Schönen Dank!

 

Funny story... when I first met my future wife, she came over to my apartment in Chicago and I had a message on my answering machine. She pointed it out and I said "go ahead and play it - it isn't going to be important." What it was was one of my old girlfriends from Germany calling because she was coming to Chicago to visit and wanted to see me. Woops!

I acted suitably embarrassed... but at the same time it kinda made me look like a hot property. Perfect timing!

 

Mein Gott in Himmel!!! You just about had a date fail there.

 

There's a cheat for this, by the way. If you have Windows it's the "Character Map." Makes all this furrin' language stuff easy fer anyone. "charmap.exe." Or just do a search for character map.

You may have something similar on Apple...or you may not. Don't know, don't care.