There is a language school in our town that offers language classes in English, German, French and Spanish. For obvious reasons I decided to take Spanish. Today was my first day of class and we were playing Taboo, a familiar and fun game. The teacher had students sit at the front of the class with a word hidden behind them, and they had to guess the word from the classes descriptions. The word for the first participant was "tacaño", or "stingy" in English. After a few wrong guesses and bad descriptions, a girl raised her hand and, to describe the word, said "es una característica de los judíos", which means "it's a characteristic of Jews."
A little shocked and a little offended, I turned my head to see who said it, and believe it or not, it was the German girl, the only one in our class. All the way across the world Jews are still thought to be stingy. It's funny because when I first saw the word my mind didn't jump to "Jew", or "me", I just thought "someone who skips out on a bill". But no, the German girl's first thought was "Jew". Nice.
Thankfully the teacher corrected her, saying it was a stereotype of Jews, and at that point the German girl (I'll call her Gretchen) knew she had been offensive.
Needless to say this clue did allow the guesser to correctly get the word. What can I say, we just like to be careful with our money, it doesn't mean we're stingy. But still, of all people, the German girl? Never could I have pictured that scenario...
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