Gottesbelästigung und Nagelknöpfe

This may not sound like the profound and utter revelation that this is--in fact, you may relegate it to the category of N.S.S.: No shit, stupid--but I assure you, this is big:


I write English better than I write German.

Obvious, right? Okay, so forget about the revelation part, this isn't Genesis or anything. It was worth a try, though.

My boyfriend's theory is that there are two distinct versions of me, an English one and a German one. As a student of politics I know to sit the fence on this one, and neither agree nor disagree, as I would imaginably be a rather poor and subjective judge. In any case, I apparently have a different sense of humor and methods of expression depending on the language I am speaking, some kind of linguistically induced multiple personality syndrome. And I guess his humor is distinct, depending on whether or not he and Leo are writing me in English or auf Deutsch.

I have managed to surprise the occasional unwary and unsuspecting German into thinking I am someone from Sachsen or something, a fellow Landesleut from a different neck of the woods, but my true colors show and within a short amount of time they figure out what I'm trying to pull. An example: I recently tried to explain blasphemy on a particularly English day, and all I could come up with was Gottesbelästigung (the actual word is Gotteslästerung), which is something approximate to assaulting God, the kind of assault usually preceded with "sexual". Way to go, points for the home team. Round two: Nagelknöpfe, which, instead of referring to the heads of nails in plurality, instead refers to the buttons of nails, which don't exist--not even in singular.

I blame my lacking German competencies on the American educational system and on my miserable career as a Germanist. The educational system, as it waits till college to encourage you to take a foreign language. The other reason, far more grevious and perhaps incorrigible, is the fact that most of the German literature I have read (Harry Potter does not count) has been in translation. Bachmann, Goethe, Nietzsche, Heine, Aichinger.... English, the lot of them. Please, don't throw anything, it wasn't my fault: the lacking enrichment of vocabulary was due to an insidious plot to ruin my life on the behalf of my profs.

See, were I to write this post in German, a) three of my four regular readers would probably not understand it, and b) I would have had to look up words like insidious (heimtückisch), incorrigible (unverbesslich) or perhaps unsuspecting (arglos). And as you all well know, I'm a pretty lazy person.

So: suggestions for phenomenal (sagenhaft) German prose, with which I have any hope of ameliorating (verbessern ....boring word) my disappointingly (enttäuschend) restricted vocabulary and my stilted (gespreizt or gestelzt) style?