Die Ente

I once spoke German with some fluency - more correctly, I once passed a fluency exam in German. An interesting language of a fascinating and impressive culture. I still have very occasional opportunities to use my remaining German.

A theme that recurs in some of my posts is the role of serendipity in life. The more intensely one leads life, the greater one reads, the more likely there will be improbable coincidences. Sometimes that serendipity is momentous, sometimes inconsequential but intriguing. The following falls into the latter category.

Yesterday I was reading an interesting article, Immanuel Kant's Guide to a Good Dinner Party. At the end of the essay is a brief remark on Kant's humor, hinging on a circumlocutious play on the German and English words for Ant, Aunt, Ente and Duck. It registered in my mind simply because I had forgotten the word for duck in German was Die Ente. That, and the fact that it was a reminder not to expect too much slapstick humor at the dining table of a German philosopher.

Kant, by the way, at one point gives an example of a joke he apparently thought very good and that he apparently heard told at a dinner party. Countess von Keyserling was visited by Count Sagramoso, who knew only broken German; at the time a schoolmaster came by who was putting together a natural history collection in Hamburg and therefore had birds on the brain. In order to make conversation, the Count said, "I have an aunt in Hamburg, but she is dead." To which the schoolmaster replied, "Why didn't you have her skinned and stuffed?" The Count had used an anglicism, Ant, for the German word for 'aunt', Tante and the schoolmaster had heard Ente (duck) instead of Ant (aunt). Life of the party; that's Kant.

Now it is some thirty years since I received instruction in German, and probably close to that since I last encountered Die Ente.

Today I was glancing over an essay, How to Learn Facts by Steven Dutch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin. With my oldest just having started college, pursuing an engineering degree and likely being deluged by facts, I was considering whether he might find it interesting. There, lurking in the middle of the essay:

The interesting thing is that when information is fully learned, it actually travels in a loop in the brain. You get new data in an often passive way (reading, hearing in lecture). Thinking about what it means leads to ideas about what you can do with the information. If the application is enticing enough, you try it out. If it works, the learning has been powerfully reinforced. If not, you have to go back, review what you learned, and try again.

Example: you learn that the German word for "duck" is "die Ente." The integration part isn't all that challenging. Later that day you see a duck in the park, think "I just learned that word" and say to a classmate "Das ist eine Ente." You now have reinforced the learning with a concrete, successful application.

So what are the odds that, knowing the word Die Ente but not having used it for some thirty years, I should come across two instances of it in the space of twenty-four hours. As astronomical as those odds might be, what then are the odds that the experience should so nearly mirror the example being offered in the second instance? Close to impossible one would say, but there you have it. We look for patterns and meaning but sometimes life just gives us improbabilities.