One of my favourite ever jokes was told to me by a German friend.
"How many Germans does it take a change a lightbulb?
One. We are very efficient"
His fairly strong accent, perpetually furrowed brow and deadpan delivery really made it
We are very efficient
Everyone that dealt with German bureaucracy, no matter if it's public or private, will tell you this is a joke no matter the delivery.
German humour is no laughing matter.
The real answer is that using a non-standardized Strichgesicht is against the rules.
DIN 5008
Punkt Komm Strich
WE DO NOT SMILE IN GERMANY
eh... just find a German who's old enough, and tell them: 7-1.
My parents lived in Germany for a while. One day, my dad dropped the car off at the mechanic, who spoke far better English than my dad did German. A couple days after that, there was a big football match between England and Germany, which I assume England won, because when my Dad went to pick up the car, that same mechanic pretended he couldn't speak English.
Yeah -- even as someone who doesn't watch football that made me grin.
Old enough? That was pretty recent
Eins und zwei und drei und... '54, '74, '90, 2014 ja da stimmen wir alle ein!!!
It was glorious. Free shots in the German bar during the end of the game
SMH she's never been on feddit.org/c/ich_iel.
I suggest the above format over links.
Germans enjoy humour, but smiling isn’t as efficient as laughing on the inside.
Honestly, we should be adapting more non English letters into our emoticons. Ü and ö are great examples, but :þ or :Þ looks way more like a tongue sticking out than :p does (though, I said non English, and þorn is, technically, an English letter...
Ÿ could be something... I'm not sure what, but something. Potentially pornographic...
ẞ or ß could be some kind of sideways boobs... Maybe an ass?
ð could be eyes if doubled ð.ð sunglasses:
ð-ðÐ could be gap-toothed smiley. =Ð nerd smiley: 8Ð
There are others, but I only have English, Esperanto, and Icelandic installed right now.
Esperanto has letters with little hats. Ĵ makes a nice little umbrella.
You mean like Lenny Faces?
͡ ° ͜ʖ ͡ – ✧
Ÿ sparkling wine - let's celebrate
Ÿ leaning on my hands, listening intently
I like this a lot. Let's toast to new emoticons! Ÿ
That's cool!
Huh. Using them from now on Ü
This just reminded me of a joke.
A German, Russian, and Pennsylvanian walk into a store.
The storekeep looks up and greets the Amish man who just walked in.
in all seriousness, it’s likely because the origin of the emoticon is tied in with the ASCII character set, and the codes available when the emoticon was conceived. emoticons were around for decades, before we started using them on phones.
in fact, “smilies” are indeed not German!!!
Eh, I feel like we would've adopted our own style by now. For example, this face ^^ was fairly popular in the German internet before mobile phones and emojis took over, because it's just two key presses on the German keyboard.
I think, the main problem is simply that umlauts look like letters to us. If someone types a random Ü or Ö after their sentence, you might think they meant to write another sentence. Or you simply do not register that it's supposed to resemble a face, because it's just a letter in your mind. Much like you presumably don't either look at an E and think that it looks like a rake, because the association with the letter is much stronger.
but i am not talking about emojis… i am talking about emoticons, which came into heavy use in the early 80’s.
in any case, i was trying to be “cute” or cheeky when i suggested that “smilies” didn’t exist in Germany, but i failed to communicate that effectively. perhaps i should’ve used a winky face, or provided a little more context about the origins. sorry about my perceived snarkiness; wasn’t my intent.
EDIT : i am actually struggling to find a reference to “^^” being used by anyone; could you point me to a source, as i am genuinely curious about this
ï
That's just an upside down dick though
With the power of unicode you can add eyes to any letter:
ẅ s̈ M̈ _̈
=̈ ~̈ ×̈ +̈
I CAN'T LITERALLY PICTURE ANY FACES LET ALONE ONES I'VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE. ALSO, WHY ARE WE YELLING?!
I DONT KNOW, BUT IM GOING TO CONTINUE TO YELL BCZ NOW ITS FUN.
SOMETIMES YOU GOT A LOT IN YOU AND IT COMES OUT LOUD AND THAT'S COOL BROTHER JUST KEEP CRANKIN THAT HOG AROOOOO
VEE DO NOT SMILE IN CHAIRMANY!
Activates hungary: Ű(looks better on paper and i just realized that)
I was a new grad student at a gathering organized to introduce us to the department, and I was drinking a hard lemonade. The department head walked up to me and said, with a strong German accent:
In Germany, zat would be illegal.
I thought she was just giving me a hard time about drinking the lemonade rather than a real beer, but then I looked it up and the lemonade would in fact have been illegal in Germany. (Or rather it would have been illegal when she was growing up there. It was legalized since then.)
That only explains half of the question...
It's so true.
