Ausflippen und Das Jupiterprojekt

New words are fun, and my favorite new fun word is ausflippen*.

From Langenscheidt's German-English Dictionary (thank you, Google Books):

"'ausflippen v/i (sep, -ge-, sn) F a) freak out, b) flip one's lid."

Ausflippen sounds as if an English-speaker made it up as a joke. It's exactly what I'd have come up with if I were trying to say "flip out" in German and didn't know the word for it**. In my never-ending efforts to lovingly poke fun at my husband, I've come up with similar constructions over the years such as "I have your ass ge-kicked (at Tetrinet)" or "That got totally up-ge-messed***."

I ran across this word last night while perusing my pocket dictionary. I picked up the book intending to look up "gern", "waehrend" and a word which I think means "airlock" but which wasn't in the dictionary. As usual, I got sidetracked, reading through column after column, watching words morph into other words through the addition of various affixes.

The reason I'd been looking up the-word-that-I-think-meant-airlock, by the way, is that I'm reading Das Jupiterprojekt (The Jupiter Project. My husband read this when he was a kid. The cover of our copy is all old-school sci-fi, complete with a space station that looks like a tin can with a rocket motor in one end. How could I not read it?

Usually, I read a book in English first, then tackle it in German (I've yet to finish a German edition of anything, by the way. The older I get, the less free time I have for fun reading). This time, I'm reading the German edition first. Tempted as I was to read the summary on the page linked above, I refrained. It'll be fun to read the English version and find out how far off-base I was (or, more optimistically, that my German is better than I thought).


*Still not quite as funny as ausfahrt.
**and was trying to be funny
***Oh all right, we rarely say "messed", but this is a family show