I still can’t get over how small and homey the White House is. The lumber yard owner down the street from where I live has a larger house. And each of Putin’s thirteen palaces could house at least 13 White Houses in it.
I’m very happy to live in a country whose leader doesn’t live with the barbaric pomp of our Putins and Yanukoviches.
And since I’m on the subject of cte things in DC, here is a very Germanic sign that made me laugh:
I lived in Germany for five years and don’t get the connection. What are you referring to?
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Too many nouns are piled onto each other, just like in German where nouns are stacked on and on to make one endless word.
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Well, that’s a useful grammatical construction shared by Germanic languages.
In a Romance language, you’d have to write something like, “National memorial for officers who enforce the law & center for visitors of the museum,” turning an 8-word English title into a 15-word phrase almost twice as long.
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Exactly. 🙂 That’s why translations from English are always a lot longer than the original and one has to reassure the customers that one wasn’t adding any stiff of one’s own to the translated text.
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Maybe you should be translating into German:
“Staatsrechtshilfeoffizierendenkmal u. Museumbesucherzentrum” — viola! three words!
Okay, the actual official German translation wouldn’t be quite that short, but it would take notably fewer worlds than even English. 🙂
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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