And sometimes Y...

When we went to Seattle’s Best this morning, we heard the guy at the cash register telling the girl in line ahead of us about how he took three years of German in high school. So when it was our turn to order, my mom mentioned that I’d taken FOUR years of German in high school (thereby crowning me Queen of High School German). The baristas explained that someone had accidentally left behind a German phrase book in the coffee shop, and they’d been flipping through it all morning. “Ich bin müde,” exclaimed the girl who made our coffees, as if to demonstrate. Which even Rick can tell you means “I am tired.” (I think Rick retained “I am tired,” “I am hungry,” and “that is not very good” from the two semesters of German he took in college…)

And then we all broke out into the German alphabet song – which is pretty much the same as the English alphabet song, with a different pronunciation for all the letters. A is “ah,” B is “bey,” C is “tsay,” etc. It also ends rather strangely, because the German pronunciation of W is the monosyllabic “vey.” However, the missing syllables are rediscovered once we get to Y, which is pronounced something like “oopsillon.” Use of the letter Y in German is actually pretty rare – it’s usually only found in words that were adopted from other languages and not really translated into a German equivalent. Like “yoga”… or the website “Yahoo.” But even so, my high school German teacher was obsessed with that stupid letter, and would incessantly tweak our pronunciation any time we recited the alphabet:

Frau (Her name was Frau Newcomer, but we eventually just shortened it to “Frau”): No, no, it’s not “oopsilon,” it’s “oooooopsilon.”

Us: Oooooooopsilon

Frau: Oeoeoeoepsilon

Us: Eeeewwwwpsilon

Frau: Watch my mouth – eeeeeooooooeeoeoeoepsilon

Us: Eueueueoooooopsilon

Frau: Oopsilon!!

Us: Screw it. We never use that letter anyway…

My first year in German class, we were all assigned new “German” names. There was a guy named Mike who became Michael… a guy named Mark who became Markus… a guy named Dave who became David – it seemed like a pretty simple system. And then there were the girls – me, and another girl named Kim (like I’ve mentioned before, there weren’t too many of us in my German class). Kim became “Ute.” Ute? How do you get Ute from Kim? Mike gets to be Michael, and Kim is Ute?? It didn’t bode well for me. I can think of several German names not too far removed from “Lisa” – Liesel, Liese, Lotte, Lieselotte, whatever. But would I be assigned one of these monikers? No, of course not. My teacher decided that I should be “Inge.”

And it’s funny how different regions of the world, and something as simple as a name, can conjure up different images. Because “Inge,” I believe, can not only be considered a German name, but also a Swedish name. But Swedish Inge would be totally different than German Inge – Swedish Inge would be a tall blond bikini model, whereas German Inge would be a three hundred pound pastry chef. At least that’s the way I pictured them. But pastry chef or not, I was stuck with Inge. For four years of German. And it may have annoyed me at first (although I think I liked it better than “Ute”), but after a while I started getting used to it. The handful of us German students would use our German names with each other, even outside of class… there were so few of us that it became like a code. A foreign-sounding-name code. My friends who didn’t take German thought my temporary name was funny, but they’d laugh once and then forget all about it. My fellow German students, however, would shoot me a “hey Inge” in the hallway when they saw me between classes, without the slightest hint of sarcasm or mockery. And after those four years of German, “Inge” just sort of became synonymous with who I was. The name I’d hated during my freshman year turned into a unique Germanic nickname. I guarantee no one else in that school ever answered to the name Inge. (And they probably wouldn’t have wanted to, anyway…)

And since I am neither a tall blond bikini model or a three hundred pound pastry chef, AND there are both Swedes and Germans in my family lineage, I’ve decided that MY Inge is an American by way of Germany by way of Sweden. And that’s not confusing or weird at all. Unlike that crazy German letter Y…