Tag Archives: Language
This Is An Anglicism
Not an Americanismcism, OK?
Those filthy-mouthed British. “Shitstorm” just won Germany’s Anglicism of the Year award (2011). Wow. I wonder if “Crap Tornado” came in second?
The punchline: “The jury’s decision is meant to emphasize the positive influence of English on the German language.” I don’t make this stuff up, people.
Mit der Wahl will die Jury den positiven Einfluss von englischen Ausdrücken auf die deutsche Sprache hervorheben.
Crisis, Doomsday And The End Of The World As We Know It
I don’t usually tend to panic when reading newspapers, but when German journalists start writing articles critical of the media’s “eternal ramblings about doomsday,” I get very nervous indeed. This is news, in other words, primarily because this isn’t news to me.
Evelyn Finger’s main concern here is the German obsession with “the” Krise (crisis) in general (crises plural) and the latest so-called Krise der Demokratie (crisis of Democracy) in particular.
“In the meantime (it started out long ago with “the oil crisis,” she believes) we have become all too accustomed to terms like education crisis, energy crisis, climate crisis and, most recently, financial crisis, debt crisis and euro crisis. We have all hoped that these crises would not prove to become any more threatening than they already are, especially since our linguistic capacity to express more crisis seems to have been exhausted: World financial crisis! But a new threatening term has been spooking the debates as of late: A crisis of Democracy. Is there really such a crisis or is the chatter about it the real problem?”
We all know the answer to that question, of course. She rightly finds this obsessive German Angslust (passion for fear) ridiculous and has no trouble exposing it for what it is; mindless, self-indulgent, neurotic nonsense. But I do wish she would have had the decency to have warned me first. I don’t like stumbling accross articles like this in German newspapers, articles that make sense by expressing something we used to call “common sense.” If I had wanted to read articles like that I wouldn’t have bought a German newspaper in the first place.
But thanks anyway, Evelyn. You may have shaken me up a bit, but I really do hope you have a pleasant week.
Das Wort Krise hatte seinen Schrecken schon fast verloren. Es klang in den letzten Monaten auch bei dramatischer Nachrichtenlage etwas schwach und durch häufigen Gebrauch abgenutzt.
Ich wulffe, du wulffst, er/sie/es wulfft…
Not that anybody out there knows who the German President is or could really care less if they did, but a new German verb has just entered the language (in his honor?) referring to, well, referring to what, anyway?
The new German verb refers to the manner in which scandal-plagued President Christian Wulff has sought to manage revelations that he accepted a favourable home loan from a businessman, holidayed at the villas of the wealthy and left a threatening message for the editor of Bild newspaper.
It’s called wulffen and actually has two meanings (at least two), according to the director of the German Language Association in Dortmund. The first is to talk on and on unprompted. The second means to be evasive about a particular issue without actually telling a lie.
Damn. I really had no idea that politicians the world over have actually been wulffen with me the whole time.
“It means something in-between.”
Have A Wonderful Stresstest
As you may have noticed, Germans are always stressed out about stuff, even stuff that isn’t particularly stressful. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the Society for German Language has just chosen “Stresstest” to be the German word of the year (you didn’t know it was a German word, did you).
You name it, the Germans have stress tested it this year (or have been stress tested by it). Whether banks, nuclear power plants, train stations in Stuttgart, rained out summers or having patience with the euro (not), this term has become a “firm component of everyday language.”
I don’t see what all the fuss is about, though. Ain’t nothing new. I remember when they used to call stress test life.
Der ursprünglich aus der Medizin entlehnte Begriff sei im Laufe des Jahres “auffällig oft” verwendet worden.
Is it Newspeak or Newsspeak?
The Fukushima worst case scenario has now actually happened, in Germany. And the Fukushima worst case scenario is that the Fukushima worst case scenario never happened. Sometimes the truth raises it’s ugly and pointy little head, even here. Only for a second or two, but still.
I read the news today, oh boy. And not that any of you out there really care or anything, but I discovered that even journalists with the best of politically correct intentions can screw up from time to time. In this case it was in a Zeit article entitled Stress und Strahlung (Stress and Radiation) by Hans Schuh*. It was about how, well, something called “psychosocial stress” resulting from the Fukushima incident will now be producing more victims than the radiation did (I think he meant in Japan because psychosocial stress victims have been dropping like flies here in Germany for months now).
Like duh, Hans. Something has to produce victims when the “Super-GAU” everyone was banking on never materialized, right?
My favorite line in the article: In hindsight it has been revealed that with regard to one aspect of the accident’s occurance the world community (he actually means Germany here, of course) was taken in by an error: The “worst case scenario in the fuel cooling basin” never took place.
I’ve got to know, folks: How on earth did this ever get past the Brain Police?
I know how. “The people” will automatically understand that the worst case scenario took place anyway, sort of, irgendwie. They have long been aware of the fact that their reality must be made to comply with your/our ideologically motivated fear agenda, so it ain’t no big thing, this one little slip-up. This type of thing only makes Newspeak stronger, I think, although I can’t claim to be fluent in it yet myself.
Im Rückblick offenbart sich auch, dass die Weltgemeinde in Bezug auf das Unfallgeschehen zumindest in einem Punkt einem Irrtum aufgessen ist: Der “GAU im Abklingbecken”, der global Schlagzeilen machte fand gar nicht statt.”
* You won’t be finding this article online for some reason. I guess it’s not fit for the masses just yet.
News Alert! Here’s the article after all. They publish these online a little later, I guess.
“Handy” finally verboten!
It’s about freakin’ time somebody got rid of that awful “English” word–and all those other so-called English words and phrases that Germans are always throwing around here so disrespectfully as if they were, I dunno, English or something.
Every time I accidentally use the word handy in English conversation (with other native speakers who don’t speak German, I mean) they look at me as if I had just arrived from Mars.
Germany’s Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer has finally struck a blow for German (and English) language preservation by enforcing a ban in his ministry on the use of what Germans working there think are English words and phrases.
Handy is one of them, like I said. Another favorite of mine that I hear in Berlin all the time is Coffee Togo. Well that’s how they pronounce it. I swear. Apparantly many Berliners are actually convinced that the coffee you can now get in those portable styrofoam cups to take along with you is from the country of Togo.
Another good one is life. You know, as in “Life Show?”
Or how about Pizza Hut? Many Germans pronounce it as the Transport Minister would expect them to and actually think that the place is called Pizza Hat.
So knock yourself out, Herr Ramsauer. Help preserve my language. You can crack down on abuse like this as often and as hard as you think necessary. Please. I mean, bitte.
Gegen den Mainstream zu leben, kann schließlich ganz schön in sein.
“Thank you for travelling with Deutsche Bahn”
And now, for the rest of you out there rolling your eyes at the conductor’s English, he’ll start speaking your lingo again. And he won’t have to sound so friendly-like all the time either.
Everyone is relieved it seems (me included) at the Bahn’s plan to reduce the number of their annoying announcements – in English. They will now only be, uh, announcing them on trains and at stations where international travellers are more likely to be (so they can better figure out together what the hell it was the announcer just said?). They won’t be talking English at folks on trains going to Kleksdorf or Entenhausen anymore, in other words.
It’s not so much that these folks don’t always speak English that well you know, it’s just that they won’t stop speaking it. Back to the future, I say – I mean past, at last.
Eingeführt hatte der bundeseigene Konzern die englischen Durchsagen – über deren Aussprache sich manch ein Passagier auch amüsierte – auf Schienen und an größeren Stationen 2006 zur Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft in Deutschland.
“We don’t say that in America.”
So what if most Americans don’t know how to speak German.
Most of us know what German means. So like, there.
A language of ideas?
German? Whose idea was that? Keine Ahnung. A language of ideas maybe, but not of very much action.
Anyways, according to man-spricht-Deutsch-Guido Westerwelle, German “is the key to more than 350 German universities and colleges, to Europe’s largest economy. It grants access to German literature, music, philosophy, and science, to the wealth of great European cultural traditions and, not least, it is the key to realizing one’s own goals and ideas.”
That’s true, I guess. Sort of. But let’s be honest, Guido. German is also the key to more than 350 German universities and colleges that nobody wants to attend, it grants access to German literature that nobody wants to read anymore, to German music that, well OK (the old stuff was pretty good) and to German philosophy that’s not much more than high speed mysticism if you ask me (which you’re not). I don’t know what German science is so I’ll just assume that it’s really cool. And if you have to learn German just to know what your own goals and ideas are, then they’re probably not worth knowing in the first place. But maybe that’s just me.
“In Deutschland ist es üblich, dass man Deutsch spricht.”
Observing Hermann 