My life for Eier

I remember when StarCraft came out. It was kinda neat, the way if you clicked on a unit, it would respond with some sort of acknowledgement. The humans would say, "Yes sir" or "All righty!"

One of the alien species, the Protoss, had even cooler ones. "I long for combat" and "Honor guide me" showed the Protoss were hard-core. But in the late 1990s, when sound files couldn't take up a whole lot of space, it was easy to mis-hear things. And in the days before the Internet, a mis-heard lyric could go uncorrected for a loooooong time.

Such was the case with this one line: "My life for Aiur." Here's a clip of what that sounded like. . Aiur, I guess, was the home planet for the Protoss. "My life for Aiur" was some kind of expression of devotion. But here's the thing -- I didn't really understand the context of the line. I *remember* when Starcraft came out, but I didn't play it. My roommate did.

What I did do, in retrospect, was interpret that line according to what made sense to me at the time. And at that time in my life, I was an hourly-wage computer technician at a law firm in Honolulu. What I heard was "hire." That's what made sense to me -- "my life for hire." I could relate to that.

Time passed, and at some point my misunderstanding got corrected, but I have revisited this story over the years. Perhaps, if I had heard that line while I was in the Army, I probably would have heard it as "My life for higher." That would have made sense to me at *that* time.

These days, I am no longer *in* the Army; I just work *for* it. And nowadays my perspectives are shaped just as much by the fact I'm the single wage earner for a family of four, and living in Germany.
So as egg prices in the U.S. averaged nearly $5 a dozen in late 2022, while I was visiting my family in Wisconsin, I could feel the pain. At their local grocery store, the price for a dozen was up over $7.

I'm convinced that -- if I'd heard that Protoss line these days, I'd probably have interpreted it as "Eier" which is the German word for eggs.
At $7 per dozen, that's not just an arm and a leg -- that's a ritual human sacrifice. "My life for Eier" would have literal, indeed.