The Essence Of Poodle

What, you may very well be asking, is he on about now?

I'm sure that literary types among you have spotted this as a quote from Goethe.  Indeed from Faust - the original runs "Das also war des Pudels Kern".  And you can translate that as "That was the heart of the matter".

However, I didn't know it as a quote from Faust.  I found it buried in the comments in a program that I was looking at.  And my very-practical-&-1-1-translation isn't wrong, it just struggles for any semblance of meaning.

"des Pudels" is the Genitive form of "der Pudel" and that means something belonging to the poodle.  And "Kern" can mean stone as in the stone in a peach.  But poodles don't have stones, that's just silly.  Kern can also mean "essence" and so I had this sentence in a program that was going on about "here is the essence of poodle" - I admit to not really knowing what the programmer was trying to achieve.

I asked my colleague and that led to a nice 5 minute diversion of a bit of poetry reading.  Faust has a nice meter to it, and when it's read by someone who as an appreciation of that and no worries about pronunciation, it sounds rather good.  I would like to hear more sometime.

So, the next time someone uses the phrase "the heart of the matter" in conversation with you, I hope you'll hit them the rejoinder "Indeed it is the very essence of poodle" and then just watch as they lose whatever train of thought they had entirely and they just look confused and they eventually feebly ask "Essence... of... poodle?"

I feel that's enough German for today.

It was a rotten day here.  I woke up to pouring rain and howling winds.  Very, very un-German weather.  However, we can really do with the rain. 

Not that far away from here in Düsseldorf, the Rhein is usually at a depth of 2m 88cm (9 feet 6), but because we've had no rain, it's currently 66cm (just over 2 feet).  The difference is about the height of Shaquille O'Neill. That means that a lot of freight can't travel up the river.

After work I was in town and in started to really rain so I took only a couple of pictures.  Here the tree with decorations.  Blue & Gold are the colours of Hessen.