Sugarcoat that fart

Oy vey, to end the year with a whimper, we figured we should talk about exploding frogs and - brace yourselves - Jew farts.

The week or so before New Year's Eve is fireworks season in Germany.

This is where we encountered the linguistic equivalent of "one man's gem is another man's  abomination", an old German slang term for the smallest firecrackers.

You know them as a package of a series of connected little crackers, just under an inch high, thinner than a pencil. You light one end, they go pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

The word is "Judenfurz", literally "Jew fart". That's the bad news. The good news is that folks around here have wised up. We have only heard it in the context of "you know what these used to be called".

The other common name for the small firecracker is "Knallfrosch", which we translate as exploding frog but others go with "bang frog".

While we are doing a linguistic sensitivity post, our black German fellow citizens have noted that the sweets once called Negerküsse (negro kisses) or Mohrenkopf (Moor's head), are now simply Schokokuss (chocolate kiss) or, more boring,  the German equivalent of chocolate marshmallow treat.

Wikipedia also claims that in Austria they are referred to as Schwedenbomben ("Swedish bombs"), which we first mistakenly interpreted as referring to the singers of Swedish pop mega band Abba.

We at the K-landnews are keeping an eye on the Austrian media so as not to miss the news report about a package to the US declared as containing "Swedish bombs" having been intercepted by airport security in a bomb scare.