Stumm!
"The Germans," as Edmund Blackadder once opined, "are a cruel people. Their operas last for six hours, and they have no word for 'fluffy'." They do however have a lot of other words, usually with sixteen syllables, and pronounced like someone coughing up a furball while shouting.
The funny thing about German is that when it exports a word, the word generally denotes something negative. German tends to provide English with words identifying subtle shades of anger and misery that never originally occured to the natives of England's pleasant, bluebell-strewn landscape. Simple examples include:
kitsch: stuff so awful that it's actually kinda neat.
ersatz: a sustitute for something real.
angst: anxiety and fear generated by nothing much in particular.
schmaltz: cloying sentimentality
liverwurst: low-rent pate.
poltergeist: an angry, destructive ghost.
kaputt: broken with no hope of repair.
verboten: forbidden
spiel: a tired, disingenuous monologue.
klutz: a routinely clumsy person.
strafe: shooting everything indiscriminately.
blitz: crushing all opposition through unending onslaught.
And those are just the simple words. When you really want to nail down the subtlties of misanthropy and grief, you need to call out the big guns:
schadenfreude: the bitter joy one feels at the misery of one's enemies.
weltschmerz: mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.
uebermench: the superior race of super men (and look where the mindset behind that word took the Germans).
sturm und drang: a state of violent disturbance and disorder, with overtones of cacophany and/or general pain and suffering.
and, most tellingly:
kindergarten: a congregation of squawking, crying, snot-nosed four year olds.
So why is it that when people need a word that denotes something horrible, they look to German? One can only assume that it is grounded in the failings of the German national character. After all, while the Italians have given us gelati, the French croissants, the Belgians fine chocolates and the Swiss fondue, the Germans offered the world pickled cabbage. That speaks volumes.
The funny thing about German is that when it exports a word, the word generally denotes something negative. German tends to provide English with words identifying subtle shades of anger and misery that never originally occured to the natives of England's pleasant, bluebell-strewn landscape. Simple examples include:
kitsch: stuff so awful that it's actually kinda neat.
ersatz: a sustitute for something real.
angst: anxiety and fear generated by nothing much in particular.
schmaltz: cloying sentimentality
liverwurst: low-rent pate.
poltergeist: an angry, destructive ghost.
kaputt: broken with no hope of repair.
verboten: forbidden
spiel: a tired, disingenuous monologue.
klutz: a routinely clumsy person.
strafe: shooting everything indiscriminately.
blitz: crushing all opposition through unending onslaught.
And those are just the simple words. When you really want to nail down the subtlties of misanthropy and grief, you need to call out the big guns:
schadenfreude: the bitter joy one feels at the misery of one's enemies.
weltschmerz: mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.
uebermench: the superior race of super men (and look where the mindset behind that word took the Germans).
sturm und drang: a state of violent disturbance and disorder, with overtones of cacophany and/or general pain and suffering.
and, most tellingly:
kindergarten: a congregation of squawking, crying, snot-nosed four year olds.
So why is it that when people need a word that denotes something horrible, they look to German? One can only assume that it is grounded in the failings of the German national character. After all, while the Italians have given us gelati, the French croissants, the Belgians fine chocolates and the Swiss fondue, the Germans offered the world pickled cabbage. That speaks volumes.
posted by Blandwagon at 7:10 PM
7 Comments:
Also dumkopf and achtung.
On a more positive note, the Germans gave us Oktoberfest, wunderkind, and wunderloben, although admittedly that last one is made up.
And although they don't often make it into our vocab, they also have those wonderfully long, literal words which are simply a bunch of nouns welded together. You can invent your own on Alta Vista, eg gummihandschuhkuhauto = rubber glove cow car. Whatever the hell that is.
This painful truth is brought to us by the fact Germans can't tolerate false fronts. You know, the ones that keep the girl at the checkout counter from openly jeering at you as you buy that Ashlee Simpson CD "for your sister". Or the waitress from telling you "Have a good evening!" even though you suspect she might not be sincere (the spittle in the food giving it away).
Since they've stripped away the social pleasantness that makes life a step above bleak repetition (to say, ambivalent repetition), all they have left are the phrases you've described.
(I worked with a German -- great guy, but I'm pretty sure these accurately reflect his feelings. Minus the spittle.)
In contrast, the whole world knows the English words "fuck", "shit", "bitch", "ass hole", "cunt" and "dick". So what conclusions can we draw from this?
:)
We can draw the conclusion that the whole world has been watching too many episodes of 'Sex and the City'.
“One can only assume that it is grounded in the failings of the German national character.” I would love to know what you think these things are... I have lived in Germany for almost 3 years now and find very little about the “German national character” to be dismal or particularly negative.
I know you’re trying to be funny and all, and, yes, well, congratulations on that.
But what about “Gesundheid”, “Zeitgeist”, “Wienerschnitzel”, etc., words very commonly used in English, none of which are negative?
If I were to take to heart what the typical German knows about America, that we all eat hamburgers every day for every meal, that we are all rich and get in our cars and drive across the street to go to the store, that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are national heroes, that “Dynasty” is a semi-real account of a typical American day, and that Alf is alive and well and living somewhere in Idaho, then I would have a pretty two-dimensional idea of what America really is.
When the tables are turned, what you think about German is kind of like this. And to think that one man’s limited knowledge of another language could then go so far as to describe a “national character” scares me and begs the use of one of our beautiful idioms “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
There I go again, raining on your parade. But, Germany is a beautiful country full of warm-hearted, very pleasant people who speak a beautiful language not devoid of “Leidenschaft” and “Freude”. Don’t pick on them just because our forefathers decided only to import their most grotesque words.
PS “Fluffy” can be translated.
PPS English is a Germanic language.
There I go again, raining on your parade.
It's interesting to note that while there is a German word for 'rain' (regen), there's no German word for 'parade'.
I rest my case.
There is a word in German for parade, it's 'Parade'. But, according to your logic, we are not a happy enough people to have had a word for 'parade' ourselves, forcing us to import it from the French. (Those French, they have such a 'joie de vivre' with their 'parades'. I wish we could be happy-go-lucky lovers like them.)
Hmph.
PS Are you maing fun of me?
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