One of my Canadian friends told me that “no one knows the second verse”; I think they added the reason “we’re not Americans”. Of course, they might have been exaggerating. And I just extrapolated from my general impression of the results of compulsory French education at high schools in Ontario.
I’ll take your word for it 
.
I went to Timmy’s and ordered a coffee. I got caffeinated dishwasher sewage. The next time, I ordered tea (with milk). They dumped a tea bag into the milk. I had thought that would be a capital offence anywhere in the Commonwealth. From then on, I only ever went to Timmy’s if I wanted donuts.
Ten years ago, there was a Second Cup in Hamilton where I wrote about half of my master’s thesis, as well as a couple of Starbucks.
I had to learn the lyrics to the Austrian anthem by heart some time around age 10. The strange old-fashioned metaphors were explained to us, line by line. The anthem was never mentioned (or sung) at school again.
Post WWII, Austrian culture has become so allergic to traditional signs of patriotism that when we first heard about school kids gathering every morning to sing the anthem (in English class, while learning about school in Britain and America), we, at age 11 or so, immediately thought of the late 1930s.
Apparently, my built-in nazi detector gets triggered by some things that perfectly decent people from English-speaking countries do - other examples include celebrating Remembrance Day/Veteran’s Day, understanding Starship Troopers (the book) as anything but a cautionary tale about excessive militarism, casually referring to somebody as a “grammar nazi”, creating Mass Effect 2, asking people to fill in their “race” on a form.
My approach to things like this is, if there is one bad thing in it, I wince. If there are two or three in it, it gets painful. If there are more, then everything is fine: the text is a historical relic that is no longer to be taken seriously.
The Austrian anthem got its lyrics post WWII; the poet was a woman, but nevertheless included a reference to “große Söhne” (“great sons”) [of the country] in the first verse, as well as “Brüderchöre” (“fraternal choirs”) and “Vaterland” (“fatherland”) in the third verse which no one knows. After two years of heated debates, which included some really atrocious proposals on how to fix it, these things were officially changed in 2012. It will take a couple of decades until everyone agrees on the lyrics again, but as hardly anyone ever sings it, no one will notice.
Hyphenation doesn’t work here. Of course drone-catching drones catch drones, so they are drone-catching drone-catching-drones. We want to talk about (drone-catching drone)-catching drones. Does it work without hyphens? Drone catching drone catching drones? drone catcher catching drones?
English is just such a limited language ;-).
Drohnenfängerdrohnenfängerdrohnen.
But it’s definitely not worth the effort to build them, as they will just be destroyed by…
Drohnenfängerdrohnenfängerdrohnenfängerdrohnen.
That is, until someone manages to build… no, let’s stop here.
Maybe this is the real reason why drones are evil.
