The Skirt

For a while now, I’ve been trying to learn some basic German, not with the intention of fluency, just enough so that if I happen to go back, I can make my way around without having to rely on the assumption that everybody knows English. And to be able to say “No, actually, I’m a Canadian” convincingly. And, I should note from the start that yes, I’ve thought about it, I’ve even come up with the wording and it’s quite amusing, but no, I’m not going to make the obvious joke about learning German to better acclimate myself to a fascist leader. Anyway, I learned a new vocab word today, the word for “skirt”, as in the article of clothing most typically associated with women and the Scottish, "skirt" in German, is “rock”, with that actual spelling. Which I wish I knew when the Tooth Fairy movie came out because that would have been the best time ever to start calling him Dwayne “The Skirt” Johnson. Of course that probably would have resulted in my spleen being ripped out, but you don’t really need a spleen and it seems like a reasonable price to pay. Now, I don’t know him, but I have to assume that as he gained international popularity this must have been quite an amusing thing when he would visit a German-speaking nation to promote a movie. Do you think anybody told him? I like to think they kept it as an inside joke until he appeared somewhere in a skirt and everybody was like “yeah, okay I get it now. I think it’s maybe not something I’d tell him to his face, but okay, he wants us to call him ‘skirt’, we call him skirt.” Also, in the interest of promoting multiculturalism, and multi-lingual education I will be forced to henceforth refer to him only as Dwayne “The Skirt” Johnson. Except to his face, because I like my spleen.