thanx god...you what?

Ahhhh...the joys of bearing witness to germanic youth and their obsession with a language they master with great difficulty. Why is it that English is rated as being so cool in German-speaking culture? People who do not speak English, randomly lob English words into their speech like handgrenades. Lethally unintelligible for native English speakers, due to being both unexpected and mangled by an attractive(NOT!)accent.

Didn't I look like an eedjit the time the sound 'patch' made it's way into a perfectly normal German sentence and I had to ask 3 times what that was, while my language-lobe did backflips, trying to find the meaning of 'patch' as a German word. Fortunately, a fellow English-speaker was on hand to ungarble that sound as the English word 'BADGE'. Well, who knew?

Or that time a friend offered to make me some 'hammen tex' . She does not speak a word of English so again I was at a loss to link this sound to a German word I recognised. Eventually, completely exasperated by my lack of comprehension she yelled out: 'I thought English was your mother tongue?!' Oh, you were speaking ENGLISH?? In that case, I would love some Ham And Eggs, thank you.

My favorite, for now, was a black tank top I saw on a punky-looking nose-, eyebrow- and earring infested bloke on the Vienna U-bahn . Proudly displayed across his chest in bold, silver lettering were the words: THANX GOD I'M A VIP!

[PS German speakers pronounce it vvhipp, one word. Kuhl, huh?]