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

Who Wrote Your Childhood Favorites?

If your favorite author doesn't appear in my poll, please add him or her to the comments. Double plus good if you include book titles, etc.

Madeleine L'Engle

Madeleine L'Engle, November 29, 1918 - September 6, 2007

She wrote stories featuring smart female protagonists when that just "wasn't done." She wove brilliant tapestries of ideas from the simplest, cleanest turns of phrase. Some of the stories she wrote involved interplanetary travel, time travel, evil incarnate, billion-year-old beings (who once were stars), religion, love and physics--but the stories never fell apart.

Like many people, my experience with her work is limited to the Time quartet and one or two of her other novels. Until I read about her death, I had no idea she had written so many things. As it is, I'm already building a reading list in my head.

I could post "Patrick's Rune," but I won't. If you'd like to read it, it's in this MetaFilter thread (which is itself worth the read).

LibraryThing

I'm not one for cluttering up my blog with widgets, thingies, doohickeys and memes but I thought I'd tack one of LibraryThing's widgets to my sidebar. Tempting as it is to fill my online catalog with classics which I've owned for years but never read (which might have boosted my nerd cred, provided I didn't spill the beans about not having read Plato's Republic all the way through--oops. There I go) I've stuck to books I read or am reading because I found them interesting.

LibraryThing allows users to catalog up to 200 books for free. Users can add comments, ratings, tags, dates acquired, read and finished, and even specify the language in which the book is written. Entries may be added by hand, by searching the Library of Congress, Amazon.com or any of a number of other sources.

The virtual packrat in me loves having a web-based way to organize so much data. The cheapskate in me loves that I can catalog up to 200 books for free.

If any of my readers are also on LibraryThing, please feel free to post links to your profiles in the comments.