Word: germanism
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...story is like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels meets The Golden Girls, with a slightly odd, Germanic twist. Angry about losing $3.5 million in investments last year in the recession, a wily gang of German pensioners were bent on revenge, prosecutors say. So they allegedly did what some who've lost fortunes in the downturn have probably thought about at one point or another: they allegedly abducted their financial adviser and locked him in a cellar for days, demanding he help them get their money back. Now the retirees - all over the age of 60 - are on trial...
...According to prosecutors, the retirees - dubbed the Pensioner Gang by the German media - interrogated James and even threatened at one point to kill him if he didn't find a way to return their money. (There was allegedly a gun in the house.) After four days, the pensioners forced James to send a fax to his bank in Switzerland to transfer funds to their accounts. And that was their undoing. The frightened consultant wrote, "Sell 100 Call.pol.ICE" on the fax, and a bank employee alerted authorities in Germany. An armed police squad stormed the house and freed James...
After trying and failing to translate the text online, we were lucky enough to find a German expat capable of explaining the subtleties of the country’s obsession with Harvard's perpetually maligned libido...
...article, playfully titled "Unimädchen-Report" after a series of enormously popular German pornographic videos, satirically mocks abstinence on college campuses...
Confused? So was the journalist who unearthed the blunder on page 122 of Lévy's slim new treatise called On War in Philosophy. There, Lévy quotes the fine insights of a French writer named Jean-Baptiste Botul on the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. But Botul, it turns out, is not a real person - he's a fictional character created five years ago by Frédéric Pagès, a journalist at the French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné. Using Botul as a pseudonym, Pagès published...