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From: mauney@ncsu.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.jokes.d
Subject: JFK == jelly doughnut
Message-ID: <2238@ncsu.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 15-Jul-83 12:01:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: ncsu.2238
Posted: Fri Jul 15 12:01:58 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Jul-83 01:17:49 EDT
Lines: 22


The preferred phrasing of "I am a citizen of Berlin" in German is
 "Ich bin Berliner."  That's the idiom.  (There was a good segment
 in the educational show "Guten Tag" in which the young protagonist
 takes a bus tour, and every time he sees a sign falling down, he
 whips out his shiny new screwdriver and fixes it, announcing to
 onlookers: "Ich bin Spezialist.")  Since JFK missed the idiom, it
 is conceivable that the first reaction of a native speaker was that
 he was not declaring membership in a class, but that he was a single
 object, and that Berliner was short for Berliner Pfannkuchen, or
 jelly doughnut.  If so, however, I'd bet that 99 and 44/100 percent
 of the audience quickly realized that he was not making an obscure
 metaphoric reference (sugar-coated on the outside, sticky and yucky
 on the inside) but that he had simply chosen an awkward phrasing.
 Certainly the reaction was more positive than might be expected if
 he had announced he had jam for brains.

 There is a theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was traumatized as a child
 by a pedantic German teacher.  The fact that Oswald would have been
 ridiculed for uttering the same sentence that made JFK popular is
 what drove him to assassination.  Jack Ruby, on the other hand, was
 working for the German government, to prevent diplomatic embarrassment.