Vasistas

I'm assuming this is what "Schwach & Sinn", a pub near St. Paulin (shameless plug), would look like after half a dozen Kristallweizen. I wouldn't know, I only had one when we went there on Wednesday. "We" would be, in this case, Sarah, Barbara, Yannick, Thomas, Cecile and another Sarah. Whenever we go out with our new found French friends I regret not having learned the language. (This is certainly one of my resolutions for '06!) They all do a terrific job of speaking German, though, which I'm guessing is one of the most difficult languages out there.

One interesting thing we talked about was the influence of the French language to German and vice versa. While there are a lot of expressions we 'borrowed' from the French (some of them, like creme de la creme don't even make sense to them), the only example of a German saying in the French language was vasistas, which got its name from German soldiers pointing at it, asking "Was ist das?" (What is that?).

So, what is vasistas? I'm not entirely sure. It's either a certain kind of window or a certain part of (a certain kind of) window. Definitely something window-related. I think. A Google Image search for vasistas gives you some vague idea. The Wikipédia article says something about it being a window "generally on ground level", while LEO translates it as "Oberlichtfenster", a term I haven't heard before, but 'Ober-' suggests a rather high-level construction.

And then, to confuse us even more, Barbara throws in that 'vasistas' can also refer not to the window, but to what you see when you're looking through the window. Or something like that.

What strikes me as odd here, is that, apparently, the French don't have a word for it, either. (Else they would have just said what it is when Germans asked them, "Was ist das?"!) I think they're messing with us! There is no vasistas! It's all a big conspiracy!