Sometimes you get pearls of germanified english, such as the following:

You have already used all available Mailinglisten. To get more, you have to update to an extensiver product.

Well, since there exists a word for the same done with japanese, “engrish”, namely, I propose henceforth to use the term “gremlish” (being one of the only pronouncable mixtures of “german” and “english”; as well as referring to little critters doing mishap) for things like this.

It’s not exactly Mock German but something produced by (somewhat) english-speaking germans who either apply german grammatical rules to english texts, or who use german words in an “englified” form in english texts. Hence “more extensive” may become “extensiver” or “mailinglists” may become “mailinglisten”.

How I manage to get the work done

Somewhere deep down in my brain, I knew I had to do some work. So I
finally got around to ask what the matter was with that work. “Ahh, we’re
doing it already, and next week is last date for a pre-meeting with the
assistant”. Okay, so I got me dated for that meeting. In the meantime I
collected some materials: The plastic card for library-access, for instance.
I thought I would make something on software-piracy. But nope. No data
available, no hard statistics, nothing. Seems that there is no software
piracy, just the SPA crying, because they want to sell their anti-piracy
software. Remind me to pirate that software.

A day before that meeting I finally had an idea of what I could do. I’d
write on victimless crimes, yep. That’s something I caught on in my
15 minutes library visit. So I emailed across the world, got some crime-
statistics from the USA, but none of Switzerland and finally went to the
meeting. I brought up my notebook and explained what I would do. The assistant
obviously was shocked by raw data and told me not to worry. “You already have
enough data”. And I had to hand in the paper in two weeks. So there.

I went home and did what I always do when such pressure hits me. I divert
pressure to things I shouldn’t really do now. So in these two weeks
I

• Started programming Perl
• Reorganized my Web-Server
• Organized 300 Megabytes Data
• Wrote these pages

Of course, sometime, I’d have to write the paper, which is, probably now,
being it only one and a half day until I have to hand it in. See?

Peter Keel,