My Gift to the People of Switzerland

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I realized, while in Switzerland, that there is no German word for "brunch." So I gift to the wonderful people of Switzerland my coinage, früstagessen.

There will be statues of me at Swiss brunch places 100 years from now.

Comments

  1. Wabulon4:16 PM

    Speechless.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous9:01 AM

    A quick look on Wikipedia tells us:

    German-speaking countries readily adopt Anglicisms, and "brunch" is no exception, defining it as "a combination of breakfast and lunch." However, the German language has its own word for "brunch": Gabelfrühstück (literally, "fork breakfast")

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wabulon9:22 PM

    "German-speaking countries readily adopt Anglicisms" is only very recently true. Like the Academie-ruled French, they went to any length to avoid Anglicisms, preferring to translate morpheme by morpheme into some kind of Germanic, e.g., Fernsehapparat = Tele (far) vision.

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah11:21 PM

    'Gabelfrühstück (literally, "fork breakfast")'

    Well, that seems to be news to the Swiss! (They were familiar with 'brunch,' however.)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous4:52 AM

    A travel writer in the New York Times writes:

    A Second Breakfast Pays Dividends
    By JILL KNIGHT WEINBERGER

    ...But, happily, I cannot entirely divorce my devotion to gabelfrühstück from the cultural experience it represents. I feel more rooted to a place, less like a stranger, when I partake of it as seriously as the Germans, the Swiss or the Austrians. .....

    ReplyDelete

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