And Speaking Of Free Speech…

The latest German Un-Word of the Year is Lügenpresse or “the lying press.” The year is still pretty young though, if you ask me. But still.

Lügenpresse

Of ill repute as it is a term that was gladly used way back when during World War I and then later by the Nazis themselves, it’s been in the news a lot these days because that EVIL Pegida is using the term, as well. If you accuse the press of lying you’re a Nazi here, I guess. So watch it.

I mean, it’s not like the media here in Germany would ever manipulate or mislead us or spin or hype or ignore things or anything like that there, right?

Der Ausdruck “Lügenpresse” ist als Parole der Pegida-Bewegung erst seit wenigen Wochen in aller Munde. Die Bezeichnung blickt allerdings auf eine lange wie auch traurige Geschichte zurück – als Devise von Demokratiegegnern jeglicher Couleur.

Germans Not Overdoing It Again

Honest. With their anti-Islamization bzw. (and) anti-Pegida hysteria, I mean.

Legida

Not with Bagida.
Not with Bärgida.
Not with Hagida.
Not with Legida.
Not with Muegida.
Not with Mvgida.
Not with Öz-Gida.
Not with Schwegida.
Not even with Merkel-Ida herself, for crying out loud.

Maybe it’s time to like gida life already, people.

German Of The Day: Denkverbot

That means a ban on thinking. And that’s what this latest anti-Pegida or anti-anti-Islamization hysteria is all about.

PEGIDA

This is so German it hurts. This anti-anti-Islamization movement isn’t primarily a protest against the Pegida anti-Islamization movement in my view (although of course it is that, too), it is going through that classic German ritual of protesting against the German Nazi past by trying to compensate for the anti-Nazi movement that never took place when it could have made a difference. It’s never “anti-” enough when and where it needs to be here in Germany, in other words.

Are these 18,000+ Pegida protesters in Dresden all Nazis and racists? Of course not, although some of them undoubtedly will be. So why call them that? Especially when a recent study indicates that over 18 percent of the German population is hostile to Islam in the first place (is that all?). Do the political parties and media on the left – and elsewhere – profit from calling them Nazis? You tell me.

If they are all such idiots then why the hysteria? Do they possibly have something to say then after all? I’m slowly starting to wonder now.

One thing really does worry me about all these Pegida people, however. It is one of their slogans I heard about the other day: “Potatoes instead of Döner Kebab!” Now that’s scary. Maybe these folks do need to be stopped after all…

Um als Gesellschaft eine sinnvollere Reaktion zu finden, braucht es etwas Gelassenheit.

World Pain In The Butt

Why do Germans always have to pick out these fancy-dad-gum-new-fangled German words of the year like Lichtgrenze (light border or boundary) when they’ve already got a perfectly wunderbar selection of traditional German words of the year or at least I think they ought to be for crying out loud?

Weltschmerz

Weltschmerz (world pain), for instance, has to be one of my all time favorites because, well, it’s just about as moany, whiney, lamenty and Germany as you can possibly get.

Now available in the U. S. of Amerika for a limited time only! I hope.

Disillusioned? Has your initial idealism been ground into cynicism? Dismayed by discovering how things really work? There’s a term for what you’re suffering: Weltschmerz.

GedächtnisEsser?

You say ‘tomato’, I say ‘tomato’… You say ‘Wesen‘, I say ‘vessen’…

The stupid creature names are fine. What isn’t, however, is that for the entire duration of the show, every single actor on it has mispronounced the very easy German word for creature…

I kept hearing “vessen” this and “vessen” that, and I had no idea what the characters were talking about, until I saw an episode summary on Hulu with what I surmised was that word written out: Wesen, which literally translates to being or creature (from gewesen, of one of the past-tense forms of the verb to be, sein)…

Trouble is, any German 5-year-old will tell you that word is pronounced VAY-zen, with a V sound (which Grimm gets right), a long E (in the German sense—pronounced like in dreidel), and a soft S (that approximates the English Z).

Joe Biden Can Say Squirrel

And that’s not that easy, you know. He can say “xenophobic,” too. For no particular reason at all.

Joe

Joe Biden says all kinds of stuff, all the time. He can say Obama’s healthcare enactment “is a “big f**king deal,” for instance. He can even say to a wheelchair-bound politician to “stand up for a round of applause.” The problem here, of course, is getting Joe Biden to stop staying stuff.

“Look at Germany. Look at the rest of the world. America is the only non-xenophobic nation in the world that’s a major economy.”

German Of The Day: Putin-Versteher

That means Putin-Understander.

Versteher

The battle of opinion regarding Ukraine has introduced a few new words to the main stream of the German language, and a few that had been leading a niche existence up until then. The best known one is Putin-Understander.

Most Russlandversteher (Russia-Understander) are, like Mr Schmidt and Mr Schröder, on the political left. The Social Democrats believe they have learnt from Ostpolitik, the eastern policy begun by Chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1970s, that when it comes to Russia rapprochement works and confrontation does not. The Left, a party that largely descends from former East German communists, goes further, channelling well-honed anti-American and Russophile instincts and seeing the Ukraine crisis as a natural Russian response to NATO’s expansionism. A Left leader, Katja Kipping, draws in American snooping, attacking Germany’s refusal to interview Edward Snowden, a whistle-blowing ex-contractor for the NSA hiding in Russia. She has called Chancellor Angela Merkel “the USA’s poodle.”

Der Meinungskampf um die Ukraine hat der deutschen Sprache auch ein paar neue Wörter beschert oder solche, die vorher ein ausgesprochenes Nischendasein führten, in den Hauptstrom der Sprache geschwemmt. Das bekannteste Beispiel ist der Putin-Versteher.

I Think It Should Have Been Superpenner

Sozialtourismus has just been selected by the Brain Police as Germany’s Unwort des Jahres (non-word of the year). It means “social tourism” and is terribly cynical and politically incorrect as it refers to “unwanted immigrants from eastern Europe” who come to Germany to presumably milk all the wonderful social benefits here, something of course social tourists from eastern Europe or elsewhere would never, ever do.

Word

Non-word of the year? The year has just begun, hasn’t it? And there are way more cool non-words out there that are much more deserving, if you ask me (I know you didn’t, but I’m telling you anyway). How about Superpenner (Super Bum), for instance? Bum is totally politically incorrect, too (that is what they used to call the homeless) and super is, well, super. So there.

Anyway, in case you didn’t know, Superpenner is a new comic action hero who has now arrived to save Berlin. And it’s about freakin’ time, too. To save it from all of those Straßenfeger (street sweeper) newspaper salesmen who accost us with their sales pitches in the U-Bahn all day long. I can hear it already: “Now with the Supperpenner comic book!”

Berlins Straßen haben einen neuen Helden: Den Superpenner – wenn auch nur auf dem Papier. Der Comic-Actionhero soll den Absatz der Berliner Obdachlosenzeitung Straßenfeger steigern.