Today’s Zits:
Despite the touting of communication at the dinner-table as fostering good social relations for the kids, not all teenagers get with the program.
When I described this strip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky at breakfast this morning, she picked up on “With or without?”, which she was familiar with, in German (“Mit oder ohne?”), as a server’s response to a request for a glass of water — meaning ‘with or without carbonation?, with or without bubbles?’
She then added the initially perplexing response you sometimes get in Switzerland: “Blau, rot, oder grün?” (‘blue, red, or green?’), offering flat water (no bubbles), water with lots of bubbles, or water with some bubbles; the reference is to the color of the bottles for particular bottled waters.
July 14, 2012 at 8:31 pm |
He meant “with or without meatballs?” (and she decided he just hadn’t heard her say “… and meatballs”).
July 17, 2012 at 10:49 am |
I’ve never heard that before in Germany or Austria (never been to Switzerland), but in the Benelux, France, and Germany that’s standard color coding. It’s the same not only for various major brands like Spa and Evian, but also for most or all of the el cheapo bottled waters. Btw, a potentially worthwhile distinction is that red contains artificial carbonation while I’d expect the bubbles in green to be natural.