VICTORY

Duolingo just finally for the first time in the entire time I've been using it accepted my Correct Potatoes Word!

-- okay let me back up.

German Duolingo is very... well, it's very Germany-flavoured. It's deeply dubious about perfectly reasonable terms from Austrian-flavoured German (I will grudgingly grant that it's just-about reasonable not to accept "vélo" as the German word for bicycle on the grounds that Swiss German Doesn't Count). On the one hand, they're frequently pretty responsive (e.g. the word I use for priest -- Pfarrer -- is now accepted as well as their default Priester, about which all I really have to say is ???) but apparently someone there has at least as much of a grudge about my potatoes word as I do about theirs, because, well.

Literal years! I have spent literally years typing in Erdapfel mulishly and then reporting that my answer should have been accepted before finally resentfully typing in Kartoffel! (Austrian German, like most of the rest of continental Europe and environs, had an extended You Know What's Sexy? French moment, so, yes, our potato-word is a calque of pomme de terre.)

So I did that again this evening, expecting to go through my usual sulky routine, and instead it just worked.

VICTORY IS MINE.