The Talk Show, Episode 38

Me and Dan:

— There’s a German word that I’m looking for.

— Where you laugh at somebody else’s misfortune?

— No. But it’s along the lines of that. It’s a German word for when you’re running the vacuum, and you see a little, like, Star Wars figure gun or a Lego piece, something of that size, and the head of the vacuum is just inches away, and you go to stop, so as not to suck it up, no matter how many times you as a parent have warned the child whom the little piece belongs to to be careful about such things so that they don’t get vacuumed up, but you try to stop, because you have memories of being a child yourself and having been warned by your parents along similar lines and yet suspecting that your own parents were unsympathetic and purposefully vacuumed up such pieces, and that the emotional scarring and memory of such lost guns causes you, no matter how many times this has happened, to stop the vacuum cleaner and but even in your best efforts to stop, the suction of the vacuum and proximity to the head are such that the piece still gets sucked up and is lost forever. What is the German word for that?

— Yeah. I don’t know.

— It’s on the tip of my tongue.

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★ Thursday, 14 April 2011