A round of German speakers?

The Konversationsgruppe met bei mir today, with Eva, Melita, Maude, Ursula, Elvira, Sabine, Hannan, Alba, Paule, Luci, Rosemary, Lolan and Annegret here for coffee, cakes and German practice. It must seem from the names that most of these friends of mine are German. However, only four spoke the language as their mother-tongue and one of those was Swiss and another hadn't lived in Germany for half a century or more. Altogether, we were from nine different countries.

We had the chairs in a circle so as to read a depressing article about the continuing adulation of Stalin whose reputation in Russia seems to have been enhanced by the opening of a Stalin Museum in Volgograd, the city that used to be known as Tsaritsyn ... then Stalingrad. A couple of weeks ago we'd studied another article about the controversial Adolf Hitler exhibition presented by the Deutsches Museum in Berlin, which is having an anything but positive effect on that dictator's reputation, so why are the Russians developing such selective memories, we wondered?

We don't always read and talk about such heavy stuff. Last week we were all laughing at a funny story by a Schwabian writer, Wolfgang Brenneisen, about a retired gentleman who, for the sake of appearances, had to keep taking his wife to the opera. The book it came from was Das Büchle vom Ruhestand (Eine heitere Anleitung in 24 Episoden).

We tend to call our conversation group as "die Runde." Chris sent me a link to an entertaining list of collective nouns today, among which is "a gaggle of women." Well yes, but that's rather derogatory.

"What would you call programmers?" he challenged me.

I came up with "a pondering of programmers."

Any other suggestions?