God's Way of Teaching Foreign Languages

You may have heard the aphorism, "War is God's way of teaching geography."* And with unfamiliar places come unfamiliar languages. A cartoon in the October 15, 1914 Hobart News tried to extract a little humor from the English-speaker's difficulty in naming that certain fortress on the Eastern Front:


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The war news, at this point, appears in the interior of the paper. Although I have only been skimming the articles, it seems to be straight reportage without perceptible bias, coming (I assume) from some news service like the United Press or the Associated Press.

Any anti-German hysteria is still so far in the future that the Hobart News has no objection to running a German-language news column, in the traditional Germanic black-letter typeface.


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From the Hobart News of July 29, 1915.

("Interesting News from the World and Life and all Countries(?)" — that's the best I can do with that headline.)

Nothing in the papers hinted — as who yet suspected? — that the U.S. would ever be involved in the fight.

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*It's most often attributed to Ambrose Bierce, but I understand that attribution is questionable.