The article makes it sound like there was some ringing, but instead of looking out of the window or checking the door the residents called the police - probably because they were afraid of kids from across the road, which is a framing that their source, the very shitty Bild, just _loves_.
What really happened is that the ringing happened multiple times, residents looked out of the window and out of the door but couldn't find anyone, and only then called the police. More trustworthy sources than the Bild do not mention any abandoned house over the road, just that they assumed it must be someone who does the ringing, which is a very sensible assumption.
I suspect that German media only picked up on it because they could end their articles with the pun that "the perpetrator has been turned into a slug", which is a direct translation of a proverb which means that the perpetrator has been dressed down.
no go and play with your friends... oh yeah thats right they live miles away and the only way to get hold of them is via a screen but because of hysterical adults (who decry the ills of social media from social media) theyve banned me from using it because it will do general detriment to me much like TV was feared to cause, much like books were feared to cause. This time is no different, hysterical parents
This seems to forget the difference between adults will fully-developed brains, and children who are still forming. I hope you'd agree with the principle through this analogy: an adult who looks at pornography would not want to show their child pornography.
> I hope you'd agree with the principle through this analogy: an
adult who looks at pornography would not want to show their child pornography.
but its nothing like pornography. were talking about "screen time" which is a vague generic idea, just the same as "social media" encompasses pretty much any major tech companies website/app instead of actual mediums for socializing like IRC, forums etc that were around for decades prior just never called that
Well, maybe it actually didn't work out so well because in a society where information can travel so fast, we have more and more people thinking hoaxes are real because they've been trained to do it...
I'm not saying there is a conspiracy behind this, just that maybe we are ignoring the bad outcomes and mark them as "bah, it's normal, we always behaved like this"
Who knows if that interview even happened. Bild makes up stuff all the time, or bends the truth to make it more interesting or fit their narrative better.
My ass would be offended if so wiped it with a BILD "news"paper.
Actually, what they mean is squatters. In many parts of Europe -especially germany and spain- it's quite normal for 16 to 25 year olds to squat abandoned buildings and live there until the police kicks them out. These kids tend to get intoxicated and do stupid stuff. Like ringing a bell in the middle of the night. The squatting thing is seen by many as a measure against speculation on living space and at the same time giving young kids a cheap place to live and get on their feet. In most places in Europe the squatting is semi-allowed because of remnants of old roman law. It's quite fascinating and -in my opinion- a tragedy that it is disappearing.
Drunk kids unable to afford housing, in a society where owners of property would rather let it get run down instead of develop it or sell it, and where it's expected that the homeless youth will harass their neighbors, sounds like a failure of society.
The young people shouldn't have to squat and abandoned buildings shouldn't be allowed to just sit and rot.
you think nobody runs out of money, or finds themselves up shit creek? what about inherited properties that you dont have the money, time or ability to renovate and youre waiting for someone else to buy it from you?
Those situations happen but they are rare and usually short lived. The reason we see boarded up store fronts and unoccupied homes for literally years is because we incentivize it.
You are making too many assumptions. Some squatters are the homeless, some are young-ish adherents of the far left, for whom this is a lifestyle choice.
The most famous Prague squat, Klinika in Žižkov, was full of blue-haired nepo babies whose parents were well connected politicians or businesspeople. That is also why it was tolerated for a fairly long time, and it was always able to summon a crowd of friendly journalists whenever someone tried to empty the building.
(Note that this is something that actual poor people rarely are able to - but lifestyle squatters who studied the same faculty before dropping out can do easily, as they still have the phone numbers of their graduated friends).
The common feature is freewheeling attitudes to drinking and drugs. Most homeless shelters or cheaper landlords won't tolerate too much consumption on the premises, or even have a dry policy. In a squat, anything goes.
Where do you get all that from? Except for famous cases like the Rote Flora in Hamburg or i guess Berlin in general there's not a lot of squatting going on in Germany, or is there?
In Germany squatting laws dictate you have to openly live at a place for 30 years and the property needs to be registered to your name in order for you to be able to claim ownership.So here it can hardly be a measure anyone can take to get a cheap place to live.
I have several friends who have squatted abandoned buildings in Europe. I have other friends who live in otherwise abandoned buildings under agreement with the owner to prevent squatters breaking in to the building. When I moved into my house several years back it looked abandoned (because it had been before buying it), and when I invited friends over for the first time some assumed I was squatting there upon arrival. Squatting is really not an unusual thing. Squatters aren't squatting in order to claim ownership. Often they're students looking for a cheap place to stay.
No, there is not a lot of squatting going on in Germany. AFAIK, the only EU countries with rather active squatting scenes are Italy and Spain, but my information is probably 20 years out of date.
A friend of ours is an old lady who needed to spend a few weeks in the hospital. While she was there, her house was squatted and removing the squatters took a bit more than a year during which time she was effectively homeless. So I am glad that the laws are gradually being tightened against squatters
Yep, a very common story. Or someone whose parents pass away, they take a few months to put affairs in order and start selling the house, only to find out the house is now being squatted and they have a nightmare to deal with.
But somehow people much prefer the “bohemian squatters sticking it to greedy capitalistic landlords who don’t use their property” narrative.
I think it was in Andy Mcnab's autobiography, where there was a story of a British SAS (Elite special forces) soldier who came home from an overseas tour to find squatters in his house. Apparently he sent flowers to them while they were in hospital.
It's not uncommon to be able to illegally do something very quickly that would take longer to do legally. I'm sure most of us are already aware of that.
> The squatting thing is seen by many as a measure against speculation on living space and at the same time giving young kids a cheap place to live and get on their feet.
This is true for abandoned empty buildings. If the owners are not using a building and someone starts to live in there, they are allowed. The idea is that the right to housing is greater than the right to own empty buildings just for speculation.
In cities were housing offering is lacking this is seen as a measure to push speculators to sell or rent their properties.
Underage kids that ran from their family should be brought back to the family or into foster care, not live in crack houses, that's not a tragedy, it's progress.
But there are some rules that allow teens above 16 to work in certain jobs and they may be considered adults depending on the circumstances depending on a judge interpretation. Below that age the police will bring the kids to their parents or to a foster home.
You make it sound like a common occurence in Europe. For my country (Germany) it has been only 1000~ buildings in total since the 1970s and I am pretty sure 90% of that has been in Hamburg in Berlin. So no, it's a very unlikely explanation for an abandoned building in rural Bavaria.
I had a report from a business of possible unauthorized remote access in a point of sale. A touchscreen system was found logged in by an unknown admin overnight. There had been weird reports of the mouse cursor moving on its own.
After a lengthy quarantine and investigation that turned up nothing, I decided to go see this machine myself for context. While I was standing there taking everything in, a fly landed on the dirty touchscreen on a smear and tripped an on-screen button as it rubbed its legs together.
Everything clicked - it was just a fly and eventually some digging revealed someone had carelessly left an admin user available: ID 2, no password, which the fly inadvertently tapped into the touchscreen login UI with two lucky clicks.
They are cheaper and they pass IPXX requirements on dust/water protection easily. But they seem to be good enough because customers, despite some complaints, keep buying devices with capacitive buttons.
Also, mechanical stuff eventually wears out - at best with good quality ones, the product becomes obsolete before they do. For instance potentiometers [1] used for volume control on stereos rust over time and eventually become unusable. So there's a durability argument too.
Yes, now the cheap cooking stoves have touch interfaces which is an OBVIOUSLY bad idea, much worse even than touch buttons in cars. The expensive professional stoves however...
I didn't realise that it was a touch sensors, and was wondering through the article how on earth a slug was pushing the buttons to bell people, and maybe somehow its slime was conductive enough to get inside and short things?
Those are its eye stalks. I don't imagine pressing with a lot of force on its eyestalks is something a slug likes to do, but then again I haven't asked any yet.
it was ringing the bell somehow, what else could it have been? even a particularly fat slug would have trouble pressing the bell as its vertically aligned.
You could probably see there was nobody there without going outside and check the doorbell panel. So they would come to the conclusion they were too late to catch the little brat
Over the years, I've had a few instances of spiders causing a related issue with our Ring doorbell camera. Like getting a notification of someone at the front door in the middle of the night, then you load it up and a giant spider is just sat right on the lens. Never had any bell presses, but I guess in this case it's one of those conducting plates.
I think it's quirky enough to be amusing, maybe even better that it's from "another" country.
Pre internet age I worked in a store where one "unlucky" guy out of reflex asked the king of Sweden for identification when buying with a credit card (fully aware of who was in front of him, it was a toy store and the king used to shop there once a year for Christmas). A colleague told the story at dinner, the colleagues father worked at an evening news paper and wrote a small blurb about it. The following two days news papers from (literally) around the world tried to get an interview with the guy.
It's regional "news" to me, but I have no doubt that I would not have heard of it if it had not somehow eddied it's way onto hn.
Regional media is dead, it's attention bandwidth has been taken up by spacially distributed, but otherwise super narrow opinion bubbles. And unfortunately I don't see any substitute for the kind of local information that we should have, like communal level politics. For a while it looked as if Facebook might survive filling that gap, but that's not really what happened.
I had a similar experience. It was a dark summer night, 03:00 o'clock. Me and my partner were semi-asleep when suddenly a loud noise from the kitchen wakes us up. It sounds eerily electro-mechanical. And then some seconds later, it happens again. And again. And again. We had no pets, no one else living with us, so we were concerned someone had broken into our apartment in the middle of the night. I mustered up the courage to enter the kitchen. There are no people there, not even a small animal. I turn on the lights and confirm that. But I see the lid of our bin is open. It was a stupid purchase from costco, this household bin with an automated lid that used a depth sensor. Turns out, there was a slug walking all over the sensor. This is how we figured out we had a big hole somewhere under the kitchen furnishings that was a source of slugs. We moved away in less than a year, but boy was it not fun to think about the slimy mess that may have been left on the countertops.
I went through several emotions reading this article.
It has to be said, that I probably have the habit of most people: skim the title, skip to the comments, skim the article, skip back to the comments, and maybe if I am intrigued enough (as I was this time) read the article.
Well, the more I skipped back and forth the funnier it became. Realized it wasn't the UK started trying to find that abandoned feral children apartment and what not. Then I decided to the read the whole article when a depressing thought mixed with indignation hit me.
The article reads like the following llm prompt: "translate this article from BILD to english make it short and funny" voilá. I still hold the Guardian in a little higher regard than other online media, but this ended up being a small gut punch. But I had fun, thanks chatgpt.
Sadly it is not a new species, otherwise what a name it could have slagged...
Nacktschneckecus Klingelstreichus
Also mysterious... why did nobody just... walk downstairs to look? Use them peepers? At least we know no software engineers are to blame. Along with the slug, we are the one group most reluctant to walk.
If they could tell no one is there why didn't they ring the electrician rather than the cops? Doorbell going off? No one there? Must be crazy invisible teens next door, not a short in the doorbell.
I have a spider named Billy (Silly Billy) that lives behind my doorbell and occasionally sets off the motion sensors when he ventures out. Thankfully, mine is still the physical push button, so he hasn't managed to ring it yet.
Probably in large part because all after WW2, German has been used exclusively when making fun of a certain dictator, in English. You've been taught that it's funny, if you're in the Western world.
Of course, before the radio, making fun of languages couldn't spread that quickly, so German was probably the first language to lose a war (or two) after globalization had started.
I don't think that's it; the usual stereotypes about Hitler and Nazis is that they were brutal, evil, and demanding, which in fact they were, not that they were silly, ridiculous, and goofy. If German sounds funny to English speakers, it's in spite of WWII associations, not because of them.
I've thought about this question a lot, and I think the answer comes from the history of English as a creole (or nearly so), consisting of a Germanic substrate being gradually displaced by a Romance prestige dialect, as the nobility all spoke dialects of Old French after the Norman Conquest. Moreover, even after that period, French was the language of diplomacy, while Latin was the language of academia and, until Henry VIII, the Church. Newton published Principia Mathematica in Latin, as was the well-established practice, and for generations studying at Harvard required learning Latin (and Greek) first. English's propensity for accepting loanwords rather than calquing them as is usual in Chinese and German has given us a large vocabulary of Latin words for use in formal contexts. New German loanwords, bu contrast, have largely come in through Yiddish, a language of desperately poor immigrants: schmuck, for example.
So it's common to have synonym pairs in which the Germanic term is informal or vulgar, while the Romance term is a formal term, sometimes an inkhorn word. Sour:acid, stuff:material, fuck:copulate, piss:urinate, cunt:vagina, cock:penis, prick:penis, shit:defecate, want:desire, fart:flatulence, balls:testicles, turd:excrement, everyday:quotidian, men:personnel, manly:virile, worldly:mundane, motherly:maternal, house:residence, big:grand, night:nocturnal, twilight:crepuscular, ass:posterior, better:ameliorate, schmuck:prepuce, water:aquatic, water:irrigate, king:monarch, armpit:axilla, cow:bovine, dog:canine, spit:saliva, rot:decay, whore:prostitute, tit:mammary, young:immature, worm:larva, enough:sufficient, grow:develop, sick:infirm, eye:ocular, think:cogitate, reckon:calculate, and so on. Pairs in the other direction are so rare I can't think of one, though I'm sure some must exist. There are cases in this list where a formal Germanic word exists, such as "breast" and "buttocks", but I can't think of a more informal Latinate synonym in those cases.
"Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits," which got Carlin arrested in Milwaukee, is Germanic from beginning to end, even "suck". So is Lenny Bruce's list, even though "ass" and "balls" have cognates in Romance languages.
All the most taboo words in English except "nigger" are Germanic, and the taboo on "nigger" is recent enough that it's shaped by quite different history—but note that English speakers, to convert the Spanish negro "naygro" into a deprecating term, assimilated it to a more typically Germanic phonetic structure, ending it in a syllabic coda that is common in German and prohibited in French, Spanish, and Italian.
(To be fair, "twat" is another possible exception; nobody knows where it comes from. Although a Latin origin is improbable—literacy in Classical Rome was sufficiently broad that we know the word "landīca"—there could easily be some unattested Occitan or Sicilian word from which we get "twat", even if it sounds Germanic phonologically.)
And there's an established idiomatic way to dismiss something by reduplicating a word, the second time replacing the onset of its first syllable with the characteristically Germanic onset cluster "schm-" as a form of ridicule: "Police, schmolice!"
As a result, to Anglophone ears, German (both phonetically and in its recognizable vocables) sounds like an over-the-top vulgar version of English with words that sound a lot like "schmuckrotfart". 'What do you mean, the word for "oxygen" is "sour stuff"?'
So I suspect that German sounding silly and foolish is particular to English speakers.
Unfortunately I can't edit it further (perhaps due to having said "fuck", "Hitler", and "nigger" in a single comment) but I need to add that "crap" turns out to come from Latin by way of Old French.
By the way, The German words in Yiddish are not bastardized standard German, but bastardized Pfälzisch, basically the dialect where I grew up. "Gefilde Fis[c]h" is how one would pronounce "Gefüllter Fisch" there, etc.
In the middle ages, the Mainz-Worms-Speyer region was the center of Jewish life in Germany.
I think I even found a wrong explanation on that Wikipedia page, simply by knowing Pfälzisch: A "Schnook" is a housefly. It doesn't match the Yiddish meaning that well, but it's the exact same word.
(The above second comment is also edit-locked, but at least at the moment this one isn't, even an hour-plus later, so evidently it wasn't "landīca" that triggered the logic, despite being by far the most offensive term in the whole comment.)
My wife, a native speaker of Spanish who doesn't speak German, reports that to her ears German sounds angry rather than silly.
For what it's worth, your initial comment showed for me as dead (i.e. shadowbanned) until I vouched for it (within an hour or so after you posted it). It would appear you managed to trip some filters with this thread :)
English vs. German vs. Swiss-German
Nut vs. Nuss vs. Nüssli
Mess vs. Durcheinander vs. Chrüsimüsi
Rascal vs. Lausbub vs. Glünggi
Chicken vs. Huhn vs. Güggeli
I've had Germans kill family too, but the video above is a non-native German speaker making fun of German words. I agree that German isn't the most pleasant language to hear spoken, but that video isn't evidence.
No, but it's a funny reminder of how it's perceived. It's not supposed to be evidence, nor I linked it as if it was some scientific proof settling the matter.
Basically captures that part you said "I agree that German isn't the most pleasant language".
I don't have to think how Germans speak there's no shortage of Germans passing around these parts.
That's how it sounds in everyone's ears, in countries with more melodic languages like Spanish or French.
(It's not even the pronunciation overplayed in the video for comedic effect, many words are already threatening sounding by themselves, just the letters on page invoke either threat or bureaucracy).
My wife and I grew up about 10 miles apart. She knew those phrases, I didn't. Why? She lived in a town, I lived in the country. Playing that game where I grew up would have been pretty unproductive. Walk a mile>Open gate>dog barks as you walk up drive>farmer comes out and recognises you>says Hello x...
A man opens a door after the bell rang. Outside is a snail, asking if they can use the bathroom. Annoyed, the man picks up the snail and throws it back to the street. A few weeks later, it rings again - when the man opens the door, the snail asks "what the hell was that just now?"
To be fair, the joke scans better in german, where "snail" is something you call someone who is being slow, and the Snail will often appear in jokes as the archetypal "slow" character, like the clever fox or the wise owl or the dumb blonde.
Almost the same in Polish. But the beginning was different - a man was talking up the staircase when he noticed a snail on the stair railing and flicked it so that it fell down 3 storeys"
...at a certain point I think you just have to assume that the doorbell is malfunctioning, no?
We've had that happen. It was annoying as hell. We didn't call the police, though. (Pretty funny that it was a slug and not a dying piece of electronics, I must say.)
No ones reads anymore, even the article ends with,
"In a statement, a police spokesperson in Schwabach, Bavaria, said the animal had “been brought down to size, taught about its territory boundaries and placed on a nearby stretch of grass”."
What really happened is that the ringing happened multiple times, residents looked out of the window and out of the door but couldn't find anyone, and only then called the police. More trustworthy sources than the Bild do not mention any abandoned house over the road, just that they assumed it must be someone who does the ringing, which is a very sensible assumption.
I suspect that German media only picked up on it because they could end their articles with the pun that "the perpetrator has been turned into a slug", which is a direct translation of a proverb which means that the perpetrator has been dressed down.
How do you know this?
but its nothing like pornography. were talking about "screen time" which is a vague generic idea, just the same as "social media" encompasses pretty much any major tech companies website/app instead of actual mediums for socializing like IRC, forums etc that were around for decades prior just never called that
My ass would be offended if so wiped it with a BILD "news"paper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDJev_Sw-j8
The young people shouldn't have to squat and abandoned buildings shouldn't be allowed to just sit and rot.
Nobody would "rather" do this. They are incentivized to, typically as an Nth order consequence of public policy.
The most famous Prague squat, Klinika in Žižkov, was full of blue-haired nepo babies whose parents were well connected politicians or businesspeople. That is also why it was tolerated for a fairly long time, and it was always able to summon a crowd of friendly journalists whenever someone tried to empty the building.
(Note that this is something that actual poor people rarely are able to - but lifestyle squatters who studied the same faculty before dropping out can do easily, as they still have the phone numbers of their graduated friends).
The common feature is freewheeling attitudes to drinking and drugs. Most homeless shelters or cheaper landlords won't tolerate too much consumption on the premises, or even have a dry policy. In a squat, anything goes.
In Germany squatting laws dictate you have to openly live at a place for 30 years and the property needs to be registered to your name in order for you to be able to claim ownership.So here it can hardly be a measure anyone can take to get a cheap place to live.
But somehow people much prefer the “bohemian squatters sticking it to greedy capitalistic landlords who don’t use their property” narrative.
It took a year to remove the squatters without risk of government violence being applied to the owner.
There's a subtle difference.
This is true for abandoned empty buildings. If the owners are not using a building and someone starts to live in there, they are allowed. The idea is that the right to housing is greater than the right to own empty buildings just for speculation.
In cities were housing offering is lacking this is seen as a measure to push speculators to sell or rent their properties.
But there are some rules that allow teens above 16 to work in certain jobs and they may be considered adults depending on the circumstances depending on a judge interpretation. Below that age the police will bring the kids to their parents or to a foster home.
After a lengthy quarantine and investigation that turned up nothing, I decided to go see this machine myself for context. While I was standing there taking everything in, a fly landed on the dirty touchscreen on a smear and tripped an on-screen button as it rubbed its legs together.
Everything clicked - it was just a fly and eventually some digging revealed someone had carelessly left an admin user available: ID 2, no password, which the fly inadvertently tapped into the touchscreen login UI with two lucky clicks.
Now designers and manufacturers have decided that everyone wants and needs touch sensors.
Sacrifice in the process -
Inadvertent triggers and lack of tactile feedback.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiometer
…have people whose job it is to clean everything every day anyway.
Teenage slugs causing havoc on a Saturday night after drinking beer in the park.
Why is this on hackernews in the first place...
Pre internet age I worked in a store where one "unlucky" guy out of reflex asked the king of Sweden for identification when buying with a credit card (fully aware of who was in front of him, it was a toy store and the king used to shop there once a year for Christmas). A colleague told the story at dinner, the colleagues father worked at an evening news paper and wrote a small blurb about it. The following two days news papers from (literally) around the world tried to get an interview with the guy.
Anything can become international news.
Regional media is dead, it's attention bandwidth has been taken up by spacially distributed, but otherwise super narrow opinion bubbles. And unfortunately I don't see any substitute for the kind of local information that we should have, like communal level politics. For a while it looked as if Facebook might survive filling that gap, but that's not really what happened.
It has to be said, that I probably have the habit of most people: skim the title, skip to the comments, skim the article, skip back to the comments, and maybe if I am intrigued enough (as I was this time) read the article.
Well, the more I skipped back and forth the funnier it became. Realized it wasn't the UK started trying to find that abandoned feral children apartment and what not. Then I decided to the read the whole article when a depressing thought mixed with indignation hit me.
The article reads like the following llm prompt: "translate this article from BILD to english make it short and funny" voilá. I still hold the Guardian in a little higher regard than other online media, but this ended up being a small gut punch. But I had fun, thanks chatgpt.
Nacktschneckecus Klingelstreichus
Also mysterious... why did nobody just... walk downstairs to look? Use them peepers? At least we know no software engineers are to blame. Along with the slug, we are the one group most reluctant to walk.
> Together residents and police discovered the slug
they did?
Does German sound funny to everybody or just the English speaking world?
Of course, before the radio, making fun of languages couldn't spread that quickly, so German was probably the first language to lose a war (or two) after globalization had started.
I've thought about this question a lot, and I think the answer comes from the history of English as a creole (or nearly so), consisting of a Germanic substrate being gradually displaced by a Romance prestige dialect, as the nobility all spoke dialects of Old French after the Norman Conquest. Moreover, even after that period, French was the language of diplomacy, while Latin was the language of academia and, until Henry VIII, the Church. Newton published Principia Mathematica in Latin, as was the well-established practice, and for generations studying at Harvard required learning Latin (and Greek) first. English's propensity for accepting loanwords rather than calquing them as is usual in Chinese and German has given us a large vocabulary of Latin words for use in formal contexts. New German loanwords, bu contrast, have largely come in through Yiddish, a language of desperately poor immigrants: schmuck, for example.
So it's common to have synonym pairs in which the Germanic term is informal or vulgar, while the Romance term is a formal term, sometimes an inkhorn word. Sour:acid, stuff:material, fuck:copulate, piss:urinate, cunt:vagina, cock:penis, prick:penis, shit:defecate, want:desire, fart:flatulence, balls:testicles, turd:excrement, everyday:quotidian, men:personnel, manly:virile, worldly:mundane, motherly:maternal, house:residence, big:grand, night:nocturnal, twilight:crepuscular, ass:posterior, better:ameliorate, schmuck:prepuce, water:aquatic, water:irrigate, king:monarch, armpit:axilla, cow:bovine, dog:canine, spit:saliva, rot:decay, whore:prostitute, tit:mammary, young:immature, worm:larva, enough:sufficient, grow:develop, sick:infirm, eye:ocular, think:cogitate, reckon:calculate, and so on. Pairs in the other direction are so rare I can't think of one, though I'm sure some must exist. There are cases in this list where a formal Germanic word exists, such as "breast" and "buttocks", but I can't think of a more informal Latinate synonym in those cases.
"Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits," which got Carlin arrested in Milwaukee, is Germanic from beginning to end, even "suck". So is Lenny Bruce's list, even though "ass" and "balls" have cognates in Romance languages.
All the most taboo words in English except "nigger" are Germanic, and the taboo on "nigger" is recent enough that it's shaped by quite different history—but note that English speakers, to convert the Spanish negro "naygro" into a deprecating term, assimilated it to a more typically Germanic phonetic structure, ending it in a syllabic coda that is common in German and prohibited in French, Spanish, and Italian.
(To be fair, "twat" is another possible exception; nobody knows where it comes from. Although a Latin origin is improbable—literacy in Classical Rome was sufficiently broad that we know the word "landīca"—there could easily be some unattested Occitan or Sicilian word from which we get "twat", even if it sounds Germanic phonologically.)
And there's an established idiomatic way to dismiss something by reduplicating a word, the second time replacing the onset of its first syllable with the characteristically Germanic onset cluster "schm-" as a form of ridicule: "Police, schmolice!"
As a result, to Anglophone ears, German (both phonetically and in its recognizable vocables) sounds like an over-the-top vulgar version of English with words that sound a lot like "schmuckrotfart". 'What do you mean, the word for "oxygen" is "sour stuff"?'
So I suspect that German sounding silly and foolish is particular to English speakers.
Also, this page is fantastic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Yid...
In the middle ages, the Mainz-Worms-Speyer region was the center of Jewish life in Germany.
I think I even found a wrong explanation on that Wikipedia page, simply by knowing Pfälzisch: A "Schnook" is a housefly. It doesn't match the Yiddish meaning that well, but it's the exact same word.
My wife, a native speaker of Spanish who doesn't speak German, reports that to her ears German sounds angry rather than silly.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-hebben-een-serieus-problee...
English vs. German vs. Swiss-German Nut vs. Nuss vs. Nüssli Mess vs. Durcheinander vs. Chrüsimüsi Rascal vs. Lausbub vs. Glünggi Chicken vs. Huhn vs. Güggeli
But I'm talking about their regular everyday speaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghRKZRcxeI4
Basically captures that part you said "I agree that German isn't the most pleasant language".
Sorry, Dutch and Turkish friends.
Turkish does have some harshness.
That's how it sounds in everyone's ears, in countries with more melodic languages like Spanish or French.
(It's not even the pronunciation overplayed in the video for comedic effect, many words are already threatening sounding by themselves, just the letters on page invoke either threat or bureaucracy).
... That's German humor for you
To be fair, the joke scans better in german, where "snail" is something you call someone who is being slow, and the Snail will often appear in jokes as the archetypal "slow" character, like the clever fox or the wise owl or the dumb blonde.
We've had that happen. It was annoying as hell. We didn't call the police, though. (Pretty funny that it was a slug and not a dying piece of electronics, I must say.)
Why is HN so uptight about literally everything?
"In a statement, a police spokesperson in Schwabach, Bavaria, said the animal had “been brought down to size, taught about its territory boundaries and placed on a nearby stretch of grass”."
I imagine that they, quite reasonably, expected that the prankster was some slimy character. And it looks like they were correct.