“Entschuldigung!” I said sweetly as my shoulder sent the dude’s face toward the bus accordian. It was the second time since I left the house five minutes ago that I’d bumped into something that I didn’t expect to bump into. One was inanimate, the other a reasonably tolerant Austrian trying to get to work.

Either I grew in size overnight, somebody trimmed my whiskers, or I’m out of it. One of those must be true, because since then, I’ve bumped into three or four more things.

Entschuldigung is German for “excuse”, but it is used to mean “excuse me,” from what I can tell. You’re basically saying, “my fault”. It might be one of the words I enjoy hearing most, but not because I like to be told “excuse me”, but because of the great variety in which people deliver it. I suppose, were my German better and more attuned to nuance, I’d be able to figure out where people were from based on how they utter this large word.

For example, some people really draw out the last syllable, and really give it a nice Teutonic “G” sound at the end. I see this behavior in well-dressed people mostly, so I’m assuming this might be a “proper” way to speak.

Some people really clip it or abbreviate it so that it sounds more like “tooligen”. And, of course, they could be saying “entschuldingen”, which would be similar in meaning, but a shortened version of “entschuldigen Sie”. But either way, it’s really, really abbreviated.

And my favorite way to answer an entschuldigung after someone bumps into me is to say “nichts passiert”—“nothing happened!” Isn’t that cool?