It’s great fun watching the early morning fog weave in and out between the hills and valleys. To observe the hillocks, hills and mountain ridges emerge from the night’s shadows, becoming more and more sharply defined with increasing light levels, as the sun, not yet visible, rises for a new dawn. The ever-changing fog-scape guarantees that the view from our house is never boring. Fog is such a plain word, yet the object it names is rich and varied. Sometimes I think in German. Rarely in full sentences, but terms or expressions pop up. ‘Nebelschwaden’ is one of them. When you pluck Nebelschwaden into google translate, you’ll get fog back, just f-o-g. Boring! Nebelschwaden, whereby Nebel stands for fog, and the ‘Schwaden’ part, which is also a term for certain wild Grasses clumping about near flowing Waters, may indicate anything from veil, curtain, haze, shroud, gossamer threads, screen and more. It’s a thoroughly romantic, descriptive word, very Schiller-ish. German is great in that regard. It’s sad that contemporary German has become such an awkward mishmash of English expressions with German endings, even when a perfectly fine German word exists. I know, I know, language always adapts to its time, globalization and all that stuff. It’s still sad, to ruin Goethe’s lovely prose. And I don’t even like Goethe!