The passing of time and culture

19 Dec 2021


I sit down, pen, workbook, textbook and a cup of tea in hand.

I learn German out of that textbook I borrowed from my local library, it's called "Teach Yourself Complete German", was published 2012 and claims to bring you up to Europe's B2 standard of language fluency.

But this isn't about the book, this is about a small tidbit, a word it teaches you in Unit 3 (entitled "Wie schreibt man das? How do you write that?").

It shows me a sentence, "Wie ist Ihre Faxnummer?" which means what is your fax number in English. This made me chuckle a bit and I thought I wouldn't bother learning the word, clearly I did because as I write this, the book is sitting upstairs and I am downstairs in my living room.

Fax isn't really a thing, whether over phone networks or via the Internet, it's been mostly replaced by email (E-Mail-Adresse) which has in turn been mostly replaced by social media and instant messengers (not AOL or MSN, I mean WhatsApp, Discord and Slack).

The book is nearing 10 years old as we approach 2022 head-first(?) so sure stuff like this shouldn't be surprising but it's still kind of funny to see what was important in the past and what is important going into the future as culture and time evolves.


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