A love letter to America

From our People are People series.

The online version of German daily Die Welt has a love letter to America. The column is in German, so you can take our word for it or see what Google translate makes out of it.

It is an honest declaration of love by a German deeply enamoured with the U.S. as a result of spending four months in California.

We figured we should tell our stateside readers about it, especially those who may feel misunderstood by the rest of the world.

For those Americans who don't like California, the article might serve as a reminder that the humble CEOs of Silicon Valley are appreciated by people around the globe.

The Welt author also asks why everything in Germany has to be so complicated, and we agree!

Just hours ago, a Twitter user going by Der_Oberlehrer (the head teacher) whose stated mission on the Twitter is to eliminate all German spelling errors pointed out just such an error in one of our German language tweets.

A compelling corroboration of the views expressed in the love letter.

We thanked the head teacher and resisted the urge to point him to a German blog post of ours with lots of German spelling errors. We do not want to be known as the peeps who point out that he embarked on mission impossible, nor do we feel the need to remind our German audience that tweeting in German is atrociously difficult.

The maximum length of a tweet is 140 characters, enough to write a nice poem, a short story even, in English.

In German, 140 characters cause what we decided to call "premature punctuation", frequently making many a tweet a verbal quickie with an unhappy ending.