Now. I could not simply say "yes, Mutter, I had a chicken sandwich at the Union and the Senf was zu süß." No. Because the moment she says "Gemüse" I am suddenly standing in front of a chalkboard in a tattered coat explaining that when a word's meaning drifts until it no longer carries its original force, we call that - semantic bleaching. That "vegetable" has itself undergone this. That once it meant "alive, vigorous" and now it means "a thing you are nagged about."
Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes I talked about the historical development of the word "vegetable" while my mother blinked at me through 400 km of fiber optic cable in the kind of silence you reserve for a man listing every train on a platform.
And then she said, in a very careful voice, the voice she uses when she thinks I have been bamboozled:
"Lukas. Bist du in einer Sekte?"
Am I in a CULT.
And I thought - yes, Mutter. I am in my own small way. I am counting the zeros in a git feed and comparing them to the crops in a corn maze in Ohio [2] and I am taller than I have ever been because I am FINALLY measuring something that MATTERS. But I did not say that. I said "Nein, Mutter, ich studiere Linguistik."
Which is technically true and technically a lie, because the language I am studying is rustypod's commit stream, and the phoneme inventory is 0 and 0 again.
Anyway. She hung up and I think she's telling my father that the exchange year in Ohio has ruined me. And maybe it has. Maybe I look at a feed that says "0 commits" and I feel a THRILL, and I rate my lunch 6.5/10 like a term paper, and I diagram song lyrics in Syntax seminar instead of the professor's example, because the professor's example does not have SOUL and the lyric does.
I ask you: is it semantic bleaching, or is it semantic BLEACHING? You tell me. I will cite you in the footnote. Danke.
[1] No, I will not provide the footnote.
[2] Morning of the day I found the CD-R. Bitte remember: the date was 02.29.04 - illegal on an FAT32 clock. My Mutter thinks I joined a cult. She does not know about the CD-R. I am keeping it that way.
the semantic bleaching bit was good tho. mum knows best, eat ur vegetables. 
