German usage: the increasing usage of spaces in compound words

Prescriptivists/conservative spellers who are interested in the German language (and can read German!) may find this article interesting: Zwiebel Fisch: Dem Wahn Sinn eine Lücke.

It talks about the increasing usage of spaces in German compound words (e.g. "Steh Café" instead of "Stehcafé"), presumably under the influence of English spelling. In the opinion of the author (which I tend to share), such creations look ugly and can occasionally even be confusing: two examples he gives are a magazine headline "Der Windmühlen Wahn" which means "the madness of the windmills", rather than "Windmill madness" as "Der Windmühlen-Wahn" (or, probably better, "Der Windmühlenwahn") would, and the advertising statement "24 Monate ohne Grund Gebühr", which means "24 months of charges without a reason" rather than "24 months without base charges" (ohne Grundgebühr).

Tales of the Sims

This morning while playing the Sims 2, I decided to invite the director of the private school; Panayiota called him on the phone, and he agreed to come the following evening.

I had Foteini make a turkey and Yiannis (or was it Yiorgos? I forget who was the grandfather, who has since died, and who was the father) go out to meet him. While he was there and waiting for the car to arrive, I got the bills from the mailbox.

That was probably a mistake, because the director had barely stepped outside his car when he said he didn't think that our household would produce a child that would fit into his school, or words to that effect; I'm guessing it might be the unpaid bills outside.

At any rate, I paid the bills, then had Yiannis call the director to make an appointment for the next day. However, he showed up immediately, which was as well since the food was ready already. It was a different director.

I asked him to eat (40/60 points), then showed him a couple of rooms (also about 40/60), then chatted to him; it didn't take long before he had assigned our home a combined score of 95/90 and said that Panayiota was accepted into the private school. Yay!

She's only got one school day to go before she's a teenager, but I'm planning on giving her a little sister or brother, who would hopefully also be able to take advantage of the shorter school hours and the lower drop in the Fun score—and even as a teenager, I think going to private school has an advantage in the job you start.

So yay! I'm especially happy about my achievement because I had only tried inviting the director once before, in another family, and I failed miserably (which caused the father's and son's Aspiration scores to drop quite a bit since it was a pretty big Want for them to get into private school).

German has uvular fricatives!

Hm, up till now I thought that German /x/ was [x]... but after listening to this page, I'm convinced that it's actually [X] (and that my /r/ is [R], not [G]).

(Also, my attempts at rhotic trills seem to be closer to an [R\] (uvular trill) than to an [r] (alveolar trill). Heh. My trills suck, and I blame my frenulum.)