Children say the darndest things

One of Amy’s newer words is “room”; she seems to use it specifically to refer to her room and will sometimes drag me there and say, “Room, room!”. Though since she can’t pronounce the /r/ properly yet, it sounds as if she’s talking about her womb!

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Stella told me this story. One evening, Amy had come out of her bed and Stella told her to get back to bed. She said to her, “Ab ins Bett!” and Amy completed the utterance: “Zack, zack!”

Stella and I found that really funny. “Zack, zack!” is hard to translate; it’s an interjection you use when something is supposed to be done quickly, perhaps something like “and make it snappy!”—so it’s something that might be used by an impatient parent, but not by the child who’s supposed to be carrying out the order. So when she did use it, the effect was rather comical.

Unwarranted precision

I just read an article (in German) which mentioned that a spammer had to pay 10.000 US-Dollar (7777 Euro).

That made me feel a bit meh. I mean, the number 7777 is cute, but it seems to imply that all four digits of the figure is are accurate. But while the original figure is quite possibly accurate to the cent (10,000.00 dollars exactly), exchange rates vary so much that I doubt anything more accurate than, say, 7800 or 7750 euros is warranted. (And besides, the original figure was probably chosen as a round number, so not all of its digits are significant—perhaps only two or three, but not five or seven.)