The absent-minded traveler

The word of the day over here is the German Kauderwelsch, which the internet tells me means ‘an unintelligible mixture of various languages’, or, from there, any gibberish.

This word I had known only as its Dutch cognate koeterwaals, n., meaning 1. ununderstandable nonsense language, 2. a foreign language not understood by the speaker. This word is of course verbed, as koeterwaalsen, v., the act of speaking, imperfectly but enthusiastically, a language foreign to the speaker but not to the interlocutor, as e.g. to the owner of the campground while on summer vacation.
I had always expected this word to be a construction of the type ‘pig Latin’, with the ‘waals’ part referring to French, as in the Wallon region of Belgium. I had also expected it to be an only-in-Dutch word with no cognates in other languages.

But no, it also exists in German! Kauderwelsch! Further etymological researches will be needed.

[The same source has also already provided me with versteigen, v., the act of going in the wrong direction while climbing a mountain. Stay tuned.]

Hello, I am de_eekhoorn, originally from the Netherlands, currently in France. I’m interested in history, science fiction, languages, music, philosophy, and also solid state physics.
My name is taken from the protagonist of many of Toon Tellegen’s animal stories, the squirrel, a compulsive traveler incapable of ignoring any side road. The squirrel likes philosophizing with his friend the ant (preferably with snacks), exchanges letters with inanimate objects and nonexistent animals, falls out of trees with only slightly lower frequency than the elephant, and in general tries to deal with grace with the perils and rewards of living in an absurdist world.
This journal may contain notes on books, music history rambles, poetry both original and translation, and whatever else I decide to be worthy of note.