Homer Vs. Kidd

I’m not sure they still make you do this, but back when I was in high school if you wanted to more easily get into college, they tried to make you take a foreign language. So I picked German. I don’t know why I did that. Spanish or Latin seems more useful. But I just HAD to pick German. Not only did I struggle in it, but it completely wrecked my ability to write in English. Why? It’s a little known fact that German is the only language in the world that requires you to capitalize all nouns.

To this day, by default, I always capitalize all my nouns, no matter what language I’m writing in (mostly English, but I do it in computer languages too). I don’t know why I allowed the noun capitalization meme to infect my brain, but it’s there, like a song that’s been stuck in my head for the last 15 years. I can’t stop. Today I wrote up a fairly wordy piece of documentation, only to realize at the very end that I forgot about my noun problem, and every noun was capitalized. Search and replace can only fix things to a point. I sometimes wonder how many hundreds of hours I could have reclaimed if I never took that stupid foreign language.

I should also mention that the only opportunity I’ve ever had to use my German was at Lake Como in Italy, which borders Switzerland. There was one waiter who tried talking to me in a language that sort of sounded like a dialect of German, but his speech was impenetrable. That was my one big chance, and I choked.

3 years of foreign language classes down the toilet.