my least favorite urban legend

While we’re on the subject of language, let me again scold my least favorite urban legend: the claim that when John F. Kennedy said “Ich bin ein Berliner,” the German crowd laughed because he said “I am a jelly doughnut.” (Because he supposedly should have said “Ich bin Berliner” without the “ein” in order to say simply that he was a Berliner.)

It was annoying even on first hearing. And people who tell it (usually Americans) generally insist that some native speaker of German verified this story. But I have never met even one native speaker of German who found the story even mildly amusing; in fact, they generally seemed confused by what is at stake with this question.

At one point I met a very stern, old-school East German grammarian and asked him about it. He said the story was nonsense. It’s perfectly fine to add the “ein,” he said, because “Ich bin Berliner” would have meant that Kennedy was literally a resident of Berlin, whereas the longer sentence implied spiritual solidarity and was more correct for that reason.

In any case, that’s a tedious one that keeps resurfacing.

See HERE, for instance.