In an old post entitled Fucking Jävla Skit Language, Watch me sleep discussed a problem encountered by teachers of English in Germany too:

Taboo swear words are probably among the first thing a second language learner learns if they have a teenage mentality. But while it’s easy to master swear words, I don’t think you ever really internalise the depth of feeling associated with the taboo.

I don’t even know how offended most native speakers of English are when they hear the F word being overused, and whether they are more offended in the USA than in Britain, but as someone who grew up amidst a lot of swearing (not all elicited by me), I find myself seeing the swearer as younger and less competent.

(Via Language Log)

Before the arrival of winter, I went on a hill walk. We may not be the surroundings of Barcelona, but we do have a hill (with a view of Nuremberg), a canal, an aqueduct and a harbour.

Writing in the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash finds that Brigitte Zypries, the German Federal Minister of Justice, is the personification of the nanny state – this follows German calls to the EU to extend laws against holocaust denial throughout the EU (at present such laws exist in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia):

The approach advocated by the German justice minister also reeks of the nanny state. It speaks in the name of freedom but does not trust people to exercise freedom responsibly. Citizens are to be treated as children, guided and guarded at every turn. Indeed, the more I look at what Zypries does and says, the more she seems to me the personification of the contemporary European nanny state. It’s no accident that she has also been closely involved in extending German law to allow more bugging of private homes.

But presumably the German courts will not support the actions of the public prosecutor’s office in Halle, which succeeded in having 22 million credit cards – that is, all the credit cards in Germany – examined to trace visitors to a child pornography website. See (in German) Udo Vetter’s weblog set up in this connection, Mikado Fahndung. (The documents were voluntarily released by banks, another pillar of German society, rather than by credit-card companies, although had they not voluntarily been released, the banks could have been forced to release them).

Flickr group Bloggers’ desks, set up by Drew B

This might be of interest to some German law bloggers who have a meme.

I might add my desk, but I have to wait till daylight.

Via Stuart Mudie

Enigmatic Mermaid found Jackie Bowman’s profile.

Here are the conditions.
1. You are not now, and never have been, a representative of a translation agency.
2. You are not a moron (if you approach BILLS, this will be tested).
3. When you communicate in writing with BILLS, all your messages will be in a grammatically perfect form of some known language. We don’’t care what the language is. We just want it to be right.

Her slogan: ‘Your deadline is unimportant’. Here’s a similar one.

See also this thread on what the value might be of ‘going Platinum’.

Also from Delia Venables Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, in an article by Joe Ury:

Since BAILII is a relatively new system, there are few cases available before the mid-1990s. The OpenLaw project aims to identify and add to BAILII a limited number of judgments that are important in the core teaching areas of law. To determine which older cases should be added, the OpenLaw project made contact with teachers of law and gathered lists of about 2,500 important judgments and these are – so far as it is possible within the lim itations of copyright – gradually being put up on BAILII.

On the Open Law page on BAILII there are links to lists of cases in criminal law, contract law, tort etc. that are intended to be put online, and the cases in the list that are already online have links. Thus one can find a list of tort cases, and there select the 1935 case Grant v. Australian Knitting Mills, one of those one remembers from one’s studies, and here it is online:

The underwear, consisting of two pairs of underpants and two singlets, was bought by the appellant at the shop of the respondents, John Martin & Co., Ltd., who dealt in such goods and who will be hereafter referred to as the retailers, on the 3rd June, 1931; the retailers had in ordinary course at some previous date purchased them with other stock from the respondents, the Australian Knitting Mills Ltd., who will be referred to as the manufacturers; the garments were of that class of the manufacturers’ make known as Golden Fleece. The appellant put on one suit on the morning of Sunday, the 28th June, 1931; by the evening of that day he felt itching on the ankles but no objective symptoms appeared until the next day, when a redness appeared on each ankle in front over an area of about 2½ inches by 1½ inches. The appellant treated himself with calomine lotion, but the irritation was such that he scratched the places till he bled.

I don’t remember knowing quite how ill the appellant became.