ersatz
Pronunciation: \er-säts\
Function: adjective
: being a usually artificial and inferior substitute or imitation
I don’t know why, but I’m fascinated with knockoffs. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in the age of generic breakfast cereals with poorly drawn mascot characters and those straight-to-video Disney ripoffs (back before Disney made their OWN straight-to-video ripoffs). Anyway, that stuff just delights me to no end.
Too bad you didn’t give any information on the origion of the word.
It’s not like it comes from any relevant European country, right?
Seriously though, is it used in German the same way we use it here? We have a tendency to dumb words down.
Not quite. In German, “Ersatz” differs in two important aspects:
1. It is a noun.
2. It simply means “replacement” or “substitution.” It need not be of lower quality.
What do you mean by „dumb words down“?
We tend to reduce words to an overly-simplistic meaning.
Since you like cheap knock-offs so much, do you know ?
No, I’ve never seen that before. WOW.
Damn, I suck at html.
Can’t you add a preview button?
Also, from my very own country (for which I apologize): http://www.dingo-pictures.de/en/
I have written a comment that hasn’t appeared, yet. Has it been caught in some kind of spam filter or has it just gone lost?
For some reason I had to approve it. Probably because of the link.
Did you really approve of that link Josh? That Dingo crap is a horrible rip off. I love how Obi-Wise looks just like David Carradine….nice going!