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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 13th, 2023

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  • Not a joke.

    In English the term “chaise longue” is sometimes written as chaise lounge and pronounced /ˌtʃeɪsˈlaʊndʒ/, a folk etymology replacement of part of the original French term with the unrelated English word lounge.[2] When English speakers imported a new kind of sofa from France in the late 1700s, they transformed the name ‘chaise longue’ (“long chair”) into ‘chaise lounge’—since ‘lounge’ is an English word spelled with the same letters and lounging is something one can do on a “chaise longue.” This variant has been documented in British[3] texts since at least 1811 and in American texts[4] since 1824.[5]



  • That grammar evolves naturally, like species do, so any rules we find for the categorization of either should reflect reality, not try to dictate it.

    For example, I just started that bit with a clause, which means it’s a fragment, not a sentence. I still put a period at the end of it and started it without any lead in, which is “wrong,” but it’s more that the rule is wrong, because what I wrote plays the role of a sentence in this case.





  • I’m currently entitled to residency, but the AfD got more votes than the left did where I live. Even SPD is getting shitty about immigrants. I’m not certain that it will actually go through before the government changes and I have to jump through different hoops to get it.

    I’d love to have your trust, but I’ve been an immigrant for years and married for months, so I dealt with the ausländeramt alone for much of that time and I’ve seen how much they fuck up (again, they’re overworked, it’s the city’s fault). If in five years I’m still in Germany with no significant issues (and my students’ stories get a lot more hopeful), I’ll start to believe that permanent means permanent.



  • I’m not sure how you intended your first line, but it bristles a bit. Especially given that my comment started off explaining that Germans tend to dismiss the difficulties of immigration.

    Things are very different city to city (as your wife is probably aware if she has any immigrants as friends), and the differences aren’t what you’d think. I have a couple of Arab friends in Halle, who get two year visas in the middle of their studies that basically get rubber stamp approved. Köln, on the other hand can be awful in terms of bureaucracy. I’m in a big college town, so a lot of international students live here and the office is totally overloaded (the university is not new, they should have hired more people in the fifties and kept up with immigration), but unlike Berlin, they are less likely to grant you residence because of that.

    I’m still waiting on permanent residence, ideally it will be easier after that. I have to visit or call the Ausländeramt multiple times to make sure that they actually process my renewals (which they do for only a semester at a time because of Uni), including reassembling documents (bank statements, insurance, school status) for them every six months. They can’t give me permanent residence yet, because they fucked up the paperwork on our marriage license, listing me incorrectly, so they have to reprocess things. I assume they’ll forget until I remind them again at least twice, and then there will be at least one more fuckup before things get pushed through.