I thought twice of whether to tease you and call you grumpy or not, but I'm honestly happy I judged you to cooly acknowledge my sympathy and take the expression the right way, hehe . Funny though, 'grumpy' and 'grouchy' are hard to discern for me, they roughly translate as the same.


I'm on a community that collects und posts deals on about everything [how boring in itself, but a very lively community, I often come for the discussions], and I started to write FAQs to some deals I am myself interested in, because all. the. time. the same boring questions trickle in. So I know the drill very well to keep things tidy, and besides that, a good chatter–information ratio is always good to keep. And I'm less and less surprised when communities like Stackoverflow (there you have it, also a Linux sub-community there, amongst others) have ultra-strict rules to keep themselves together and comprehensive, and avoid too much noise, be it said banter or duplicate questions.


I've thought about you and what you told me about your life in the other thread, and I'll pick it up soon. I know there is no hurry, but even digitally distant conversations turn cold at some point . And kudos for checking out my name, hehe. It's a term a very good friend of mine primed years ago. Frog fingers are the ones you have when they are both cold and clammy.

My sense of humour stretches pretty far and wide, from about wicked to downright sick. Rarely known anyone German to have such a subtle sense of humour though, what a delight! (In my experience, what sense of humour Germans as a nation seem to have seems rather lavatorial, as we call it here, or at best, rather silly or irrelevant. But perhaps that's too much of a generalisation?) 'Grouchy' has somewhat more aggressive overtones, whereas 'grumpy' is a good bit milder. Hence, I'm definitely more of a grouch.


Yeah, different approaches - hard to say the latter isn't better or preferable at least in some ways, but personally I tend to prefer a bit of lenience when it comes to a bit of happy banter or even something of a reasonably polite argument. And of course, there's usually an 'Off Topic' forum where almost anything goes, usually. (Which is where I perhaps will move our last couple of posts.)


Ah well, I was wondering whether FFs had some sort of idiomatic meaning or perhaps some sort of literary connection. Thanks for enlightening me on that. Alas, as is usual with idiomatic expressions, there's no English equivalent to froschfingers. On the whole, there aren't a lot of idiomatic English expressions, mostly they have their roots in older words that have otherwise fallen out of use over the centuries or even millennia but have the same or a similar meaning as the 'proper' modern Eng. term, or they are regional or even local dialectal words/expressions, which comes to the same thing really - makes life much simpler. (And of course there's [cockney] rhyming slang - expressions such as 'Rosy Lee' - tea, 'tea leaf' - thief, 'dog and bone' - phone, 'half inch' something - pinch (or steal) something, 'boat race' - face, and so on almost ad infinitum. This was originally conceived by 19th century London Eastenders - cockneys, to be exact, i.e., those born within the sound of the bells of Bow Church in the eastern part of the City of London - of the criminal variety. The purpose was that cops hanging out in pubs to pick up gossip etc. wouldn't be able to understand what they were talking about, what 'job' they were planning and the like. )

One cannot have a too-twisted sense of humour, me thinks. And I slightly jumped at 'lavatorial'. I understand the word and its meaning well, but I think even there are grades and levels of wit and cleverness to distinguish. For example, I came across Australian humour about two years ago, and found it often to be very absurd and close to the loo, but I sincerely enjoy it. If you have a few minutes, I can recommend you hunting down Aunty Donna on YouTube. Not everything is gold, but I deeply fell in love with them the first time I saw some sketches.
Thanks for clearing up the distinction, so it's more a thing of tonality, which I was unable to detect. Funny thing is, and thank you so much for all the praising words, I'm really quite obsessed with understanding and 'breathing' (British) English, as mentioned before, and often find myself reaching out to vocabulary quite by heart, and then having to look it up only to see I had the right notion for the right words. It's like sleeping or ‘inherited’ lexicalisation for me, that's really marvellous to experience. Not quite full-on assimilation, and I find myself in lengthy conversations and at some point just losing the right words to say, like gaps opening up.


Unless it's a hardcore-techy and very strict info-focussed like Stackoverflow, having one's fill at banter isn't bad at all. I understand people disapprove e.g. if they're here to get their specific problem solved, and don't care for some online odd bods like us having a good time in their support threads. If we try to keep a balance, we're probably golden. I for one enjoy seeing people actually getting along instead of arguing and stomping on each others toes . That is, if this is getting all too friendly and too harmonic, go and release your grouch just one more time .


Mind you, nobody would know what ‘Froschfinger’ (singular and plural form) mean if you're just tossing the term. It's not lexicalised in our language, it was just invented by my friend. You can easily explain it, but it's not a fixed idiom.
As for idioms and expressions—as mentioned earlier, that's one of the reasons I love you Brits so much. You're rich in vocabulary, especially colloquially. Man, and I haven't even really dipped into the different regions and local variants as much, including Cockney. Which would require me to eventually come over from the mainland again, and see a bit more than just London. While travelling is still possible, it hasn't been simplified by you exiting the EU just now .

On any account: Dearly happy to meet you, with all your wisdom and your sense for the little things. I can already hear some bloke scream ‘Get a room’.

Apologies for getting back so late, but as you'll know I've had a lot of nonsense etc. to deal with in the other forum and PMs. Argh! And *that* user name - how infantile is that! Anyway....




Perhaps I should have clarified the 'lavatorial' bit above a bit further. It really refers to humour that is decidedly 'lowbrow', i.e., neither subtle nor refined, and does not necessarily imply or refer to anything connected in some way to the lav. English/British humour traditionally tends to be quite subtle, often self-deprecating, never mean let alone vicious, but rather gentle (although, more recent comedians, if one can still call them that, fall far off the mark IMO). On the whole, there's nothing we like more than gently taking the mickey out of ourselves.

In the past, I saw the odd bit of Aussie comedy on TV here, principally Paul Hogan in his own show before he went on to fame and fortune with 'Crocodile Dundee' - some of it, yeah, alright, somewhat amusing, but most of it didn't really strike a chord, it just seemed too silly or worse. There's none on TV and hasn't been for ages and ages, and it's not missed here to be honest. I don't 'do' YouTube as for one thing I use TOR Browser around 90% of the time which isn't really compatible with video, and for another, I have neither the time nor the interest in watching YouTube videos. And for a third, I won't touch anything Google with a very long barge pole.

As for 'breathing' British English, there are many ways to help - long holidays in the UK, exploring different areas - if you want to see where a regional/local accent comes from, look at the landscape, some would say and there's a grain of truth in that - are one way, a satellite dish, same as for German free-to-air channels or Sky TV, with a British 'Freesat' set top box so you can watch all the free-to-air British channels (of which there are far too many, including to my utter disgust a whole plethora of Asian channels - hell, if you live in a country, you should master the language and absorb the local culture and integrate and assimilate, AFAIC, no ifs and no buts). Oh, and a good English dictionary also helps - none better than the OED (Oxford Eng. Dicty.)

And never be afraid of making mistakes, inc. using perhaps the wrong word or whatever. It's from our mistakes that we learn the most.

I'm curious, do you pronounce our dental fricatives, i.e. voiced and unvoiced 'th', correctly? It's quite rare in my experience among Germans and other continentals, even among my friends and acquaintances who are German and others, both living here and not living here. Which is a pity really, as originally these consonants where integral to all Germanic languages. Old Saxon/Low German lost it later than most and even still used the letter 'thorn' (a letter of runic origin) in early Middle Low German. Now the only languages to have preserved the dental fricatives are English and Icelandic, the latter also still using the old letters thorn (originally unvoiced) and eth (orig. voiced) albeit now interchangeably for either, as well as the letter 'ash' - a combined 'ae' pronounced as 'a' in 'ash'.



LOL! Nothing to 'grouch' about. And after all, we're in the Off Topic forum, so there can't be any objection.


Ugh, London! Steer well clear. Get out into different regions - Northumbria, North and West Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, the Lake District (definitely out of season), the West of England, the Southwest, Dorset, East Anglia, Kent, Hampshire - we have some of the most varied and beautiful landscapes anywhere, and excellent traditional local cuisine if you can find it, preferably home cooked. (On the whole, traditional English cuisine is much maligned and most unjustly so for it's on a par with the best in Europe. In my book - and I have travelled the continent widely - the only continental cuisine I'd really rate highly is Italian and perhaps southern French, although Portuguese sounds tempting too but never been there, alas.)

Well, Brexit may well have been a bit of an economic disaster for us, but on the whole I'm actually quite delighted we're out of the EU. It should never have become the 'EU' but stayed the European Community. But then, in good part our then Prime Minister and Maastricht were to blame for that. The EU is such a totally undemocratic institution and is really operated for the benefit of the big multi-nationals. Another thing that annoyed me endlessly was that we were always made out to be 'bad Europeans'; yet, we implemented all European laws and regulations, while the same was never true for France and Germany who seemed free to carry on as they pleased. To be honest, I hope the EU crumbles apart soon. Granted, it complicates travel in some ways, but not too much really.




LOLOL! Err, already happened of course in an abusive post. And, likewise very happy to meet you.