Calling Ze Germans!

[shinytoaster]

I was thinking about compound words in German today, as you do. The British papers are running a lot of features about Germany at the minute in preparation for the World Cup. Indeed, yesterday's Grauniad spent a whole section analysing every facet of ze special relationship, running the gamut from bemused articles about nudity from the British correspondents, to apologetic rants about dumplings and potatoes from the German correspondents, and lots of the same old brow-beating analysis of The Bad Old Days. Then this morning, reading Metro on the tube, I learned it is illegal in Germany to make rude hand gestures at other drivers! So it's fair to say Germany has been on my mind...

Anyway, one of these articles was all about how the British sense of humour is based on the 'pull back and reveal' concept, such as:

'There I was, stark naked, covered in jam, with a badger clamped to my nipples.... Then I got off the bus.'

But this is harder to make work in German because of all the huge compound words. So, bringing us up to date, today I started writing an article about the Belgian IT services market (unrelated to Germany except by proximity, but go with me, here), and because I secretly want to be a Sun journalist, I came up with two punning headlines:

Belgian market takes frite as internationals mussel in

And...

Belgian market waffles on

Both of which I think are tabloid-worthy. So then I started thinking about waffles, particularly potato waffles. And then the best thing in the world occurred to me:

I presume the German word for waffle is Waffle. It's a suitably northern European word to be generic across English, Dutch and German. And I know the German word for potato is Kartoffel.

So logically, a compound word in German for potato waffle must be Kartoffelwaffle!

And this is indeed the funniest thing ever. All I need now is a German to tell me if I'm right or not, so I'm throwing the field open...