She asked me to come with her, so I followed her into the room. We were alone. She was attractive. And she wasted no time with pleasantries. "Get undressed please!" she said.

But wait! This wasn't a daydream. This was the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. And the words she spoke were German. Not, "Zieh dich bitte aus!" Rather, "Machen Sie sich bitte frei!" That, gentle reader, could only mean one thing: I'd been led into an examining room. The young blonde was a nurse. The doctor would be in shortly. I hoped it wouldn't hurt.

It did.

What were you thinking?

Sich freimachen, which can also mean "to take time off work," is the official way of saying "to get undressed," literally "to make oneself free (of clothing)." This is the meaning of frei in Freikörperkultur ("free-body culture," i.e. nudism), which is quite popular in these parts.

A body that's been "made free" isn't necessarily one that's been disrobed or allowed leisure time, though. The Nazis -- who advocated freedom through work, not freedom from work -- attached the cynical motto Arbeit Macht Frei ("Work Makes [One] Free") to the entrances of some of their concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Laborers there, as we know, were typically made free of their lives.

Then there's einen Brief freimachen, "to put a postage stamp (or stamps) on a letter," freeing it for delivery -- or rather, freeing it from an obstacle to delivery, namely no prepayment.

Frei (and its English cognate, "free") has an interesting background -- it's a love child. Linguists say an early meaning was "beloved," "belonging to the loved ones" (cf. Gothic frijon, "to love"). A related word is Freund ("friend") -- originally "loved one," "lover." The archaic German verb freien means "to marry"; also "to court," "to woo." Hence a Freier is a "suitor." Today Freier is chiefly a euphemism for a customer of a prostitute, or "john."

For the ancient Germans, frei was a legal term. "Belonging to the loved ones" were kinfolk and fellow tribesmen, and frei came to mean "protected," "enjoying full rights," "not in bondage." The modern meanings of frei developed from this.

They're diverse. Take the three compound nouns Freibier, Freibad, and Freitod, literally "free beer," "free swimming pool," and "free death." While Freibier is what you think it would be, a Freibad isn't a swimming pool that costs nothing to use. It's a swimming pool im Freien, or unter freiem Himmel ("under the free [i.e. open] sky") -- that is, an "outdoor swimming pool."

And a Freitod is neither a death outdoors nor a death that costs nothing, such as one outdoors as opposed to in a hospital, where you're fed through the arm and pay through the nose. A Freitod is a "suicide," i.e. a voluntary -- freely chosen -- death.

Hmm. Could Patrick Henry have had it both ways by blowing his brains out?

Germany, hardly the most laid-back place anyway, is on edge as it prepares to host this year's Group of 8 summit. Mark June 6-8 on your calendars, sports fans! If past summits are any guide, there's more in store than meetings of suits (and a skirt) capped by a ho-hum joint communiqué. To keep extraneous excitement at a decent distance, authorities have sealed off the venue, the Kempinski Grand Hotel at the Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm, with a 12-kilometer-long fence made of concrete and steel topped with rolls of razor wire. Nine naval ships will patrol the coast, border controls will be tightened, and potential troublemakers may be taken into preventative custody.

Earlier this month, police in half a dozen German cities raided homes, offices, and hangouts of anti-globalization activists suspected of planning attacks to disrupt the summit. Thousands of G-8 foes across Germany, mainly in Berlin and Hamburg, took to the streets in protest. The demo in Hamburg turned violent; eight people were arrested. Tempers flared further this week following reports that police had taken scent samples -- identifiable by sniffer dogs -- of several militant protesters. The action was reminiscent of methods, generally deemed to have stunk, used by former East Germany's snoopers to keep tabs on pesky dissidents.

A phantom whiff of another putrid period in Germany's past comes up on the government's official G-8 summit Web site, which refers to the participants with awkward precision as the major industrialized countries' Staats- und Regierungschefs ("heads of state and government"). In English, the going term is simply "leaders." The German cognate of "leader" is Leiter, a word used to describe the leader/head/director/manager of a company, school, orchestra, department, etc. The main word for "leader" in German is Führer. But because of its association with a certain historical figure, Führer is now problematic as a title for a national government's leader, and that goes double -- make that quadruple -- for Germany's.

In other languages too, words sometimes become discredited, of course. A recent example in American English is "decider."

While translating a German text the other day, I stumbled across the word Infrastrukturplanungsbeschleunigungsgesetz, i.e. "Infrastructure Planning Acceleration Act." Wait -- no one would say, "Hey, I recently stumbled across the Matterhorn." So let me rephrase that:

I smacked into that sucker.

German is, of course, notorious for its monstrous noun formations. In his essay "The Awful German Language," Mark Twain wrote: "Some German words are so long that they have a perspective." Indeed. Like Picasso's "Guernica," Lower Manhattan, or Rosie O'Donnell, they can only be taken in fully from a distance.

How about this one? Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, i.e. "Beef Labeling Oversight Transfer Law," which made the short(!) list of the Wiesbaden-based German Language Society's 1999 Word of the Year.

Why are German words allowed to get so long, anyway? Is it -- dare we say it? -- a Teutonic foible for the phallic, found also in fast cars, spiked helmets and endless sausages? Or an attraction to the martial, in which letters even, whole battalions of them, are made to march in tight ranks across the page?

Perhaps, gentle reader. Perhaps. But let me advance another theory: a German predilection for romanticism, i.e. for the dark, heavy and mysterious, which in textual terms translates into the abstract, complex, and convoluted.

Long compound nouns stand out, majestically, like mountains, their meanings partly shrouded in clouds. Or to use a different metaphor, they are forests unto themselves, dense and somewhat forbidding, daring you to enter.

"Chaoten zündeten Schanze an," screamed a headline this week in Bild-Zeitung, the gazette of choice for Germany's average, knuckle-of-pork Ottos. It seems that leftist rowdies had rampaged again in Schanzenviertel, a colorfully combustible low-rent district of Hamburg.

It's telling that leftist rowdies, not rightist ones, got stuck with the name "Chaoten," which has no equivalent in English and can be loosely translated as either "scatterbrains" or "rioters," "brawlers." Is a rightist mob less "chaotic" than a leftist one? In a certain sense, yes: A leftist mob generally vandalizes property indiscriminately, and leaves people (except cops) alone. A rightest mob generally attacks people discriminately (selecting blacks, gays, foreigners, etc.), and leaves property (except that of blacks, gays, foreigners, etc.) alone.

"Chaoten" is more negative than "Rechtsextremisten," the latter being merely descriptive while the former is disparaging. "Chaos," after all, is anathema in Germany, where order, discipline, cleanliness, hard work, etc. are held up as national virtues, if not always upheld. Whenever Teutonic order goes awry, Germans see "chaos." A traffic snarl is "Verkehrschaos." A heavy snow results in "Schneechaos." Then there's Regenchaos. Regelchaos. Rechtschreibchaos. Schulchaos. Familienchaos. Arbeitschaos. Urlaubschaos. Umzugschaos...

Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. It lurks everywhere.

The fear of, and aversion to, chaos may explain why German authorities -- even in former Communist East Germany -- historically have appeared "blind in the right eye" ("auf dem rechten Auge blind"), i.e. more tolerant of right-wing extremists than left-wing ones.

For all their faults, Faschos at least want order.

Roger Cohen, editor at large and columnist of the International Herald Tribune, has just written a decidedly mixed review of "Überpower. The Imperial Temptation of America," by Josef Joffe, co-publisher of the highbrow German weekly Die Zeit. While praising the book's content -- "a brilliant polemic for benign American centrality" -- Cohen savages its style, particularly the "endless, irritating alliterations." A prime example: "balance, bond and build," Joffe's prescription for American power.

Apparently without knowing it, Cohen has hit out at a tic of German journalism in general (Whoops! Alliteritis can be contagious!). Alliteration isn't restricted to German, of course, and serves an important purpose when used properly. In prose it's like perfume: It should draw attention to what's beneath, and not to itself. Otherwise, it distracts and annoys (not to say stinks). Tabloid journalism, advertising and poetry can take heavier applications with no ill effect. In Germany, though, alliteration is often sprinkled liberally on serious journalism too.

I don't know why. Perhaps it's something in Germans' makeup, an errant gene that's also responsible for their affinity to oom-pah-pah music. In Joffe's case, a genetic predisposition to alliteration may have been inadvertently reinforced by his parents naming him Josef.

Headlines and titles are the most popular playgrounds for Germans' alliterative urges. "Pleiten, Pech und Pannen" is a perennial favorite, in line with Germans' penchant for pessimism. "Titel, Thesen, Temperamente" has been the name of ARD television's "Kulturmagazin" since 1967. "Männer, Mädchen, Motoren." "Götter, Gräber und Gelehrte." "Gulasch, Geigen und Genossen." "Turmaline, Tempel und Touristen." Mixing and matching is marvelous!

No matter what the mood.

In 2002, when the German media industry hit the skids hard, Bavarian Premier Edmund Stoiber opened the annual Medientage München with the words: "Konkurse, Kündigungen, Kurzarbeit und knappe Kassen -- wir blicken auf die größte Branchenkrise der Nachkriegszeit."

Es ist vollbracht. The World Cup is over. The Italians are champions. The Germans are überglücklich to be third. And the overwhelming consensus is that the month-long tournament in Germany more than lived up to its slogan.

What was the slogan again?

"Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden," officially translated into English as "A Time to Make Friends."

Which doesn't mean the same thing at all.

Those six simple words, "Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden," are a nice example of the difficulty of translation. The Germans wanted to present themselves as welcoming, friendly hosts. "The world (i.e. people from all over the world) is our guest," the slogan says, "and we are the world's friends. So feel at home!" It's succinct, rhythmic, and also winningly self-effacing: It doesn't even use the German words for "we" or "us," let alone Germany or Germans. It manages without a single verb, too.

The English version makes no reference, however oblique, to the German hosts: "A Time to Make Friends." With whom? Nubile, inebriated Brazilians? English soccer hooligans (also inebriated, only more so)? People from all over the world? The Germans, finally?

A more literal translation would have been "The World Visiting Friends," or "The World at Friends'," or "The World as a Guest of Friends." Clumsy slogans all. Which is surely why World Cup organizers opted for "A Time to Make Friends," not a bad slogan really. "A Time Among Friends" would have been closer to the original, but less enticing.

Might there have been a better choice? Perhaps "The World Comes Round to Friends." It has all the elements of the original, virtually the same meter, and alludes to soccer besides. As the great Sepp Herberger (he coached West Germany to victory in the 1954 World Cup) once noted: "Der Ball ist rund."

The Beautiful Game has kicked up a lot of dirt in recent months. In bella Italia, a momentous match-fixing trial starts next week. In Germany, now hosting the World Cup, a referee who rigged matches for a betting syndicate was sentenced to 29 months in ze clink last November. Maybe all the background noise about people doing crummy things for money explains Jürgen Klinsmann's slip of the tongue on Tuesday. In an interview after Germany's 3-0 thrashing of Ecuador (Miroslav "Miro" Klose scored twice), Coach Klinsmann said:

"Miro ist seit Monaten in bestechlicher Form."

Say what? "Bestechlich" means "bribable." Klinsmann obviously meant to say "bestechend," which means "dazzling," "brilliant," "great."

A clip of the slip was shown later that evening on "Waldis WM-Club," a World Cup TV talk show hosted by sportscaster Waldemar Hartmann. It was striking that Waldi and his guests, which included sharp-tongued comic Harald Schmidt, merely mentioned the goof discreetly and moved on.

Before Germany notched three exhilarating victories in the World Cup's first round, Schmidt relished ridiculing Klinsmann's Swabian-accented, oft-ungrammatical German (Klinsmann: "Es wäre doch wunderbar, wenn wir die wären, die wo im Sommer Weltmeischder werden."). But now Klinsmann, who was mercilessly criticized before the tournament, is sacred. He's made flag-waving believers of millions, and the rest don't dare profane him in the excited multitude.

Costa Rica, Poland and Ecuador -- those are the teams Germany has beaten so far. Hardly the cream of the crop, sports fans. Tomorrow the knockout stages start when Germany plays Sweden, a tougher nut to crack. If Klinsmann's charges lose, he'll have to watch his tongue again.