False Friends

Eric | November 16, 2007

As I learned today, Beamer is not an English word. It must be one of those “germified” pseudo-English expressions like Handy. Believe it or not, we Germans say “Handy” if we mean a mobile phone! Now that I think about it: Why the hell? Ok, you can hold it in your hand but you can do that with a lot of things… Weird.

A Beamer (in German) is nothing else but a projector. I was actually had already convinced of the fact that Beamer is an English word because Beamer-latex is a latex package for slide presentations, to be shown on a projector. Well, turns out that it was written by another German 😉 There you go.

False friends are really hard to get rid of. I think it took me more than a year to get rid of the false correspondence between actually and “aktuell” (German for currently).

What’s your funniest or most annoying false friend?