German Joys

German Word of the Week: Bauernfängerei

The CDU/CSU has just released a White Paper, "Preserving Creation," that argues for quitting the current plan to quit nuclear energy (Ausstieg aus dem Aussteig, in German).  We just can't do without it, says the CDU, since it's still the cheapest CO2-free way to create energy. 

During a call-in debate on the paper this morning, each side accused the other of Bauernfängerei: simplistic demagogic argument.  "You can't tell people this horrible energy source is compatible with Christianity! That's Bauernfängerei!"  "The idea that energy costs will stay the same if we shut down out reactors is Bauernfängerei!"

Literally translated, it means "farmer-catching" or "peasant-catching."  You can see some in the following video of the North Minehead by-election starting at about 4:30:

German Word of the Week: Tante Emma Laden

From the Niederrheinstrasse in Duesseldorf:

Explanation for non-German-powered™ readers below the fold.

For Calculus-Haters

So, like all red-blooded cat owners, I'm checking icanhascheezburger.com for an update, and see this:

It's an OK Lolcat, but I've seen better (here and here, for instance).  Haven't we all known cats who love to -- wait a minute, what's that on the sink?  Laufen?  That's German.  Teh odd Inturnets subkulcher of Lolcats have reeched Jurmminy?!!1! 

Hmm.  The English Wikipedia entry has yet to be translated into German (Hungarian and Spanish are covered, though).  To verify that this was in fact a German Lolcat picture, I looked up the brand "tofix" on the bottle in the background.  It's an Austrian firm that specializes in toilet cleaners.  Their German-language website is here. 

Whenever I see a website like Tofix's -- nice, but not too sophisticated, pretty 2002-looking -- I always look for a little Union Jack picture, for the English-language version.  A big company will hire professional translators for their fancy, Java-encrusted websites, leading to disappointingly competent translations.  But a smaller firm like Tofix will usually hire Ute, the quality control supervisor's wife, who spent 3 years studying education in New Zealand.  And indeed, that's what we have at the English-language website of Tofix/Rorax enterprises.  Here's their mission statement:

Tofix has been the specialist for cleaning and hygiene in bathrooms and toilets. It offers powerful products appropriate for all cleaning requirements. It combats limescale and urinary calculus and is safe to use. The Tofix product range represents powerful cleaning and perfect cleanliness within no time.

In fact, they have a product called WC Urinary Calculus Remover that does nothing but remove urinary calculus.*

And, I say, not a moment too soon!

* I have some sympathy for the translator.  The word Ute was trying to translate, Urinstein, doesn't even exist in English.  There's no official entry for it on dict.leo.org, you are instead sent to a discussion forum containing the suggestions "urine scale" and "urinal cake" (which is clearly wrong).   Now "urine scale" is pretty close, but really, how often do you hear that?  I doubt a company in squeamish Anglo-Saxonia would put the word "urine" on the front of a toilet-cleaning product.  Not so in Germany.  We see here the renowned Central European earthiness at work.  In fact, you can buy a special stain remover (g) that promises to remove "blood," "sperm"and "pus" from your clothes.  Something for the serial killer on your gift list!

German Word of the Week: Aufgebrezelt

This is a very special two-part GWOW.  In Part I, the GWOW itself, and a very nice one, I might add.  Then, in Part II, a special bonus: sociopolitical ruminations!

Part I: Aufgebrezelt

Aufgebrezelt means "pretzeled-up," and refers to someone who's gotten all dolled up to go out into the night and attract the attention of the opposite (usually) sex.  These days, German girls who want to 'pretzel up' usually go in for white leather belts and pointy white shoes.  Depending on what sort of neighborhood you're in, you might also see large plastic hoop earings, and -- if you're lucky -- feathered hair.  Pancake makeup never went out of style.

Now, you're probably thinking that the girls in the photo at left aren't all that pretzeled-up, although I'd say they're moderately pretzeled-up.  The photo is an illustration from a 1997 short educational film about becoming a woman (g), produced by a major German public television station in cooperation with the Federal Center for Health Information (g), which still exists.  As does the Federal Center For Political Education (g), not to mention the 16 Consumer Information Centers that exist in every German state (g).  These are all public institutions whose principal goal is to furnish Otto Normalverbraucher (Joe Sixpack) with basic information about his health, his government, and the consumer products he may be interested in buying.

As an ancient philosopher once said, time, in Germany, is like a river with many bends and a weak current.  This means there are hundreds of little eddies in German culture, in which fashions and trends from past decades whirl lazily about, never again to be swept up in the surging current of Progress.  There are still government-licensed chimney sweeps, for example, and any given apartment building in a middle-class neighborhood will have window decorations that look exactly as they might have looked in the 1950s -- even if the people who live in the apartment weren't even born then.  Turn on any German radio station, and you may actually hear an earnest, nudge/wink-free review of the latest Bon Jovi record.

Part II: Sociopolitical Ruminations

Put simply, when Germans find something they like, they stick with it.  For decades.  Thus we return to all these federal ministries for providing information to citizens.  Growing up in the U.S. in the 1970s, I saw lots of wholesome educational TV shows and ads produced by the federal government, or by civic-minded corporations.  The good people from the government would tell you why you should immunize your children, warn you not to litter, explain how a bill becomes a law, or explain why it's illegal to make racist comments in the workplace.  At the end of the ad or short film, you were told that more information was available to those who wrote a letter asking for pamphlet #755 from the Government Printing Office in Pueblo, Colorado*

As I grew older, these institutions and ads seemed to disappear from public life pretty much entirely.  Sure, there's still a Government Printing Office, and various federal agencies still give away pamphlets and posters -- about nutrition, for instance.  But nobody pays any attention to them, really.  The sense that there was one "America" that could be pulled together for an anti-litter campaign, or that ordinary citizens should expect the government to advise them what to eat or buy, seems quaint, if not positively nanny-state-ish.  Especially in the age of the Internet, who needs some government agency to tell you about consumer products, when you can get a dozen different reviews with a simple Google search?

But you won't find me sniggering at large German public institutions acting as conduits for practical information to ordinary Germans.  You could make a very good case that many of America's problems stem from the assumption that the free market alone will take care of citizens' information needs.  Of course, most of my European readers are saying right about now: 'How naive can you get?  If you dry up neutral, independent channels of information about things like diet, personal finances, or community involvement, the free market will not step in with adequate substitutes. The free market looks at people at consumers, not citizens, and primarily wants them to spend and indulge themselves.  It doesn't particularly care about their long-term health, their general knowledge, or their psychological well-being.  And in a consumer-driven economy, the free market is positively opposed to financial responsibility.'

They're right.  For all you libertarians out there, remember that we're not talking about well-educated and well-informed people with plenty of leisure time.  They can take care of themselves in any country and will, of course, seek out (and often pay for) high-quality information, in America as they do in Germany.  What all those public-service ads and agencies did was for the benefit of the masses.  Judging from what you read even in American news sources lately, average Americans are getting more ignorant, unhealthy, and selfish.  Plus, they can't control their spending -- America has, overall, a negative savings rate (Germany's is about 8 percent).  The subprime mortgage crisis is driven in part by huge numbers of Americans who just had no idea how to save money, stick to a budget, or plan for a financial setback.  (If you don't believe me, click here).  And, of course, lenders who were all too willing to indulge their fantasies.

Could it just be a coincidence that so many of these dumb decisions Americans are making are just the kind of thing the government used to give people good advice about?

* Why Pueblo, Colorado?  Who knows? Probably some U.S. Representative from that Congressional District who amassed 34 years of seniority, and brought a huge government facility to his home district.

German Word of the Week: Schadenfreude

While in the U.S., I had a few conversations with friends about Schadenfreude, the German -- and English -- word that describes a feeling of satisfaction in seeing an enemy (or, sometimes, even a friend) beset with adversity.  Schadenfreude is literally "damages-pleasure" or "harm-joy."  Pronounce it SHAH-den-FROY-duh. 

I have several questions for the moral philosophers who read this blog (you know who you are):

(1)  Is Schadenfreude a sin?

(2)  If so, is it more sinful to feel pleasure in the downfall of enemies, or of friends?

(3)  Can Schadenfreude be healthy?

(4)  Is Schadenfreude really just a form of envy?

Discuss!

Americans with Odd German Names Teil Drei

Should we be worried that an American with a peculiar German name is a top adviser to the President of the United States?

“This is very much in accord with the president’s vision from the get-go,” said Karl Zinsmeister, a domestic policy adviser to Mr. Bush....

I think we should, given that his name means, roughly, "interest-rate-master."  The German word for compound interest, by the way, is Zinseszinsen: "interest-rate-interest-rate."  Ingenious, no?

German Word of the Week: Muttermundschleim

In Planet Germany, American Eric T. Hansen notes that medical Latin and Greek took over daily discourse in English, so that even the "simplest peasant" in an English-speaking country has to try to pronounce words like esophagus, larynx, mucus, or gastrointestinal. 

German found a much better solution: it just took ordinary words and combined them in directly descriptive ways.  A nostril in German is a Nasenloch or "nose-hole", a larynx is the Kehlkopf "throat-head" (well, sort of), gums are Zahnfleisch or "tooth-meat."  Mucus is Schleim "slime," (crude but effective), and mucus membranes are Schleimhaut or "slime-skin."

Which brings us to Muttermundschleim, a word I didn't know until I woke up one day to a radio feature on the Austrian gynecologist Hermann Knaus (G), one of the first physicians to popularize the rhythm method of contraception.  You already know that Schleim is mucus, but what on earth could Muttermund, or "mother-mouth" be?  What's the kind of mouth only a mother could have?  Why, one that speaks babies, of course.  And lo and behold, the "mother-mouth" is the cervix, which all of us have seen once headin' out, and only gynecologists (and certain other people who should generally be avoided) have seen headin' in.

So putting it all together, yes, the subject of this week's GWOW is, er, cervical mucus.  If you'd like to see a picture, just go below the fold.

German Words of the Week: Angstschweiss and Angstlust

It is often said that Eskimos have over 40 words for snow. Which is bollocks. The Economist once said that "If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, Germans have as many for bureaucracy." Which is not bollocks.

Germans also seem to have as many words for fear. People here break out in "fearsweat," (Angstschweiß), and just a few days ago, I read a glorious new German word in my fancy weekly newspaper: Angstlust (G). The enjoyment of fear. Not just horror-movie, roller-coaster fear, but everyday fear. In my experience, if you ask a German "What are you grateful for?", the conversation will last 30 seconds. If you ask one "What are you afraid of?", it will last 30 minutes.

So what are Germans afraid of? This handy chart says it all:

The source of the chart is this paper. For those of you who aren't yet German-enabled™, the chart's title is "Developments in Various Forms of Fear Since 1991" (no, really -- that's the title!) and the legend reads, in order:

• Increase in cost of living
• Worsening of the economic situation
• Becoming unemployed
• Serious illness
• Become a long-term-care case when old
• Terrorism
• Lower living standard when old
• Crime

The conclusion is clear. In the past six years or so, Germans have become much more scared about everything. Except crime.

But don't feel sorry for them. First, it may well be the case, as most Germans say, that Germans seem much more scared than other people you meet simply because they are more honest about their fears. Second, do not immediately associate fear with misery. You cannot grasp the German character until you learn one profound fact: Germans enjoy being afraid (Angstlust, people!). Especially when they can all be afraid of the same thing, which produces feelings of Gemeinschaftsgefuehl, social togetherness.

German Word of the Week: Warzenhof

There'll be light blogging for the next few days, because I'll be visiting a seminar in beautiful downtown Recklinghausen.  Thanks for your patience.

But before I go, quick: What is Russian actress Svetlana Metkina accidentally showing in this picture? If you said "nipple," you're only 10% right. In fact, she's mostly showing aureola, the nipple's staging area, or plush honeymoon-suite bed, or landing strip, or perhaps just 'hood.  That circle of brown around el areal sensitivo.

Which brings us to German. German words for body parts are frequently priceless, and the more sensitive the body part, the more risible they are. One look at "shame-region," for example, and you'll see what sort of killer material Freud had to work with.

The word for nipple in German is Brustwarz. "Breast-wart." I don't suppose the nipple is very happy about this, but what can he do? Grow a tongue and begin talking? If he could, he would probably point out that, under the same logic that saddled him with his ludicrous appellation, we should be calling our mouths "face-anuses," or our toes "foot-cysts."

As compensation, though, our friend the breast-wart gets to dominate the aureola, which is not called aureola in German, but rather Warzenhof, which you could translate as "wart-corona," "wart-yard," or my favorite, "wart-court."

All hail the nipple! Warty little king of his bouncy, circular court!

French Word of the Week: Internaute

Last night I caught a bit of a documentary on arte about the influence of the Internet on the recent French elections. Francois Bayrou was out in front using the Internet to mobilize voters, and even proposed an Internet debate. Alas, he found -- like so many before him -- that the Internet still only reaches a tiny fraction of the country's population. The smartest, best-looking fraction, of course, but still just a fraction. In France, where 85% of the population voted in this last Presidential election, that's not enough.

People who use the Internet are called, in French, internautes. Shouldn't this word be brought into English, and even German? Why can't we all be called Internauts, or Internauten? I hereby announce a world-wide initiative, the Global Internaut Alliance (GIA, not to be confused with the Armed Islamic Group) to make this happen.

Oh, an one other funny thing was the action of French independent-media entrepreneur Karl Zéro. As a gesture of protest against French election law -- which forbids the release of vote projections until hours after the polls have closed -- he announced himself as a "refugee" in front of the Belgian Embassy in Paris, so that he could post the projections on his website. They let him inside, and he went straight to a computer -- only to find out that the Internet had crashed everywhere in France owing to huge demand for election information. Or, least, that's what they told him...

German Words of the Week: Sargzwang and Friedwald

"The costly aversion of the eyes from death--", Philip Larkin called it. Not in Germany. A popular children's books over here is a German translation of a Swedish book called "The Best Funerals in the World," (G) in which a team of three children provide funerals for dead animals they come across. One of them shovels up a grave, one writes a "poem by the gravesite," and one sheds appropriate tears.

Today on the local radio call-in show (G) the subject was again death -- a woman from Hesse wants to have her father's ashes transported to Switzerland and compressed into a diamond. The dead man's mother objected, and a court in Wiesbaden upheld the objection. Under German law in most states, unconventional burials are either forbidden or strictly regulated. Everyone must be either cremated or buried in a coffin, in an actual grave in a conventional cemetery. Although they can choose to be buried anonymously if they wish.

The guest during the call-in show was "Gerold Eppler, Kunstpädagoge, Stellvertretender Direktor Sepulkralmuseum Kassel (G)" I haven't any idea how to translate Kunstpädagoge except literally -- someone trained in the pedagogy of art. The "Sepulchral Museum" has, let me assure you, just been added to my next in-Germany tourist itinerary.

German Words of the Week: Dissen & Cruisen

I'm listening to the radio this morning, and a woman's talking about the new edition of the Pons publishing house Woerterbuch der Jugendsprache (Dictionary of Youth Language). Some nice examples can be found here (G): Solarium = chick-toaster; coin-operated Mallorca. Fat guy = Sidewalk-tank, Puddingsteamer, Double-Whopper. Weakling: Teletubbyzurueckwinkler - "guy-who-waves-back-at-the-teletubbies."

Two of my favorites were dissen and cruisen (G), which means just about exactly what they mean in English. Now, as we all know, when you want to express a wish or an "irreal" proposition in German, you have to do weird stuff to the verb, like add a -te at the end, change the vowel, or sprinkle a few umlauts over the vowels. As always, the irregular verbs get the weirdest conjugations.

A friend and I derive strange joy from trying to imagine how this mysterious Konjunktiv II Präteritum transformation would look for new German words. Any guesses? I'd guess dissen would be conjugated regularly, so it would just get a -te. But cruisen has a 'u' in it, so maybe, in my little fantasy-world, it could get its own very special umlaut: "Ich crüiste mit euch gern, muss aber hausafgaben machen."

What do you think? Am I onto something? And if I am, can't we trademark the Konjunktiv II Präteritum of new German words, so that we get a couple of Euro-cents everytime someone uses them?

German Word of the Week: Pimpf

An acquaintance recommended to me Walter Kempowski's Tadelloeser & Wolff, an autobiographical novel about a young man's coming of age in Rostock just before and during World War II.

It's told from the young man's point of view, the way a child might tell it: as a series of short vignettes consisting mostly of direct sense-impressions. Sentences often incomplete. It sounds a bit strange, but I find it fresh and strangely innocent, and it's productively unsettling to see war-mongering propaganda, pervasive anti-Semitism, political persecution, and hideous battle injuries reflected through the uncritical, curious eyes of a child. It's also a vocabulary exercise -- a stumper on every page. Kempowski's father, for instance, constantly refers to things as total verbumfeit, and camping trips bring us words like Eichelhaeher.

At one point, the young male narrator starts referring to himself as a Pimpf, which means "little squirt" in German. Many English-speakers find German words with seemingly extraneous 'f's at the end particularly lovable (yes, you do pronounce them). But, I think to myself, why is he calling himself a little squirt? It gets even odder when he begins talking about all the Pimpfe getting together, putting on shiny new uniforms, marching, chanting, and doing collective chores like sweeping the streets.

You guessed it -- they're little Nazis. Before you joined the Hitlerjugend, there was a preliminary stage for boys of 10-14 called the Jungvolk. A former Pimpf named Wolfgang Herchner remembers (G), on the homepage of the German Historical Museum:

1938: Finally, we were ten years old and could (had to) join the Hitler Youth, or more precisely the Jungvolk. We were "Pimpfe", as people said back then, often a little dismissively. In our fantastic uniforms, however, we felt really manly. On weekends and Wednesdays we were ordered to perform service.

We were drilled in everthing that would makes us as hard as steel, as agile as greyhounds, and as tough as leather. Sport training, skill in cross-country marching with camouflage and orientation exercises. Survival training, shooting, throwing hand grenades, and first-aid, as well as test of courage -- everthing encouraged the youthful ambition to grow into battle-ready young men.  In holiday camps, we got a taste of soldierly communal life, and the boys were taught to wean themselves from their parental home. We were given the feeling that we were to serve the Fatherland and, most of all, the Fuehrer, which was of course the highest and most worthy goal for a member of the Hitler Youth. At that time, we had never learned or experienced anything else.

If you follow the link at the beginning of this post, you'll see that the Bild tabloid newspaper has brought out a special bargain edition of the book, which weighs precisely 522 grams. The book was apparently also made into a television series in 1975, of which many people seem to have fond memories indeed.

German Word of the Week: Arschgeweih

I won't be coy: I like girls with a lot of tatoos skin art and piercings body modifications.

How about when the skin art is art located just above the rear end? Do the Germans have a word for that?

Yes, they do, Arschgeweih: "butt-antlers." A glorious specimen on the left, courtesy of the Jaegermeister Miss Arschgeweih contest.

Of course, to take the analogy to real deer antlers further, you'd have to imagine two women in the middle of a field running backwards toward each other, smacking their butts together in order to prove their dominance.

But since this is a family blog, we won't be going there.

German Word of the Week: Schamgegend

No more meandering essays for the moment. (They'll be back, though, and that's both a promise and a threat). It's time for a new German Word of the Week™*, this blog's most popular feature.

Schamgegend: literally translated, "shame-area". Is this the run-down part of a city, which locals never show to tourists? Is it the part of your cheeks that turn red when you blush? The part of the brain that regulates embarrassment? Nope.

Need some clues? Think about these two other perfectly respectable German words: Schamhaar ('shame-hair') and, er, Schamlippen ('shame-lips'). If you've got a reasonably filthy mind, you've alread figured out what a Schamgegend is. Yep, it's the good old pubic region; that is, where the human naughty bits are located.** I'll let you figure out Schamlippen for yourselves.

* - I haven't really trademarked German Word of the Week yet, but that shouldn't stop you paying me large licensing fees if you wish to refer to it.

** - No, there is no Schamstange ('shame-rod'). Yet.

German Words of the Week: Afterkind & Afterwelt

Translators live by one golden rule: if you ever see a cheap old dictionary in your source language (i.e., the language you translate out of), buy it. A German-English technical dictionary from 1955, a dictionary of turn-of the century German slang, a tourist phrasebook from 1970, they're all worth buying. In such books -- and sometimes nowhere else -- you can find out that the strange word you just red in a novel about Communist Party intrigue is 1950's East German slang for "nuclear meltdown."

Following this rule, I recently bought the Kleines Lexikon Untergegangener Wörter ("Small Dictionary of Lost Words") as soon as I saw it in a local bookstall. It was written by Nabil Osman (an Egyptian student of German lexicography) in 1972. It's a curious collection of words that dropped out of the German language around 1800 or so, for a variety of reasons (regularization of spelling, the substitution of German-based expressions for Latin-based ones, etc.). The words Afterkind ("After-child") and Afterwelt ("After-world) appear on pp. 26-27. Afterkind is an illegitimate child, one conceived "after" (i.e. outside of) marriage; the Afterwelt is the afterworld, just as it would be in English.

What's wrong with these words? After all, so to speak, they are nice cognates of the English word "after," so you could say they contribute to intercultural understanding. The problem, however, is that the German word After is a homonym (same word = different meanings). The other meaning of After, and the one that became dominant in Germany about two centuries ago, is, err, "anus". You can see the problem. But it wasn't just "Anuschild" and "Anusworld" that had to go, the change in the meaning of After, according to the Lexikon, triggered a regular verbal genocide -- 110 German words were ruthlessly exterminated in the early 19th century because of their "deadly closeness" in pronunciation to a certain piece of excretory equipment.

German Words of the Week: Ursprache & Weltschmerz

This is a very special word of the week.  It will involve a personal reminiscence, a nerve-racking, high-stakes championship contest, and adults torturing young girls with German words.

First, the reminiscence.  Back when I was a young lad, I participated in the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee.  What is a spelling bee, some of you ask? Simple -- you take young children, say a word to them, and then order them to spell the word. Because Americans are  competitive folks, you have the children all compete against each other to spell various words. If you spell one word wrong, you are thrown out of the contest. If you spell it right, you go on to the next round. The words get more and more complicated. Since English has the largest vocabulary of any language, this means the words get really f#$%ing hard to spell.  If you reach the final, they might throw at you totally fucked-up words like "eleemosynary" or "chthonic."

I don't like to brag, but if there's one thing I can do, it is spell. Think of me as a little bit like Stephen Wiltshire, the human camera. He's autistic, but what he lacks in social skills, he makes up for in drawing ability. He can draw near-perfect pictures of buildings, or even the entire city of Rome, after seeing them only once, briefly. Like Stephen, I lack many social skills, but I can spell just about any word in the dictionary. Annihilate, daguerrotype, persiflage, or even hepatosplenomegaly, I can spell them all.

German Words of the Week: Vokuhila & Tohuwabohu

Viersen, a city near where I live, just hosted Europe's Biggest Monster Truck Rally.  Soon it'll be traveling to Lower Saxony, and then to Norway and Sweden.  Here's an interview (G) with the man who put on the show.

And what a boring interview it is. There's nothing about silicon-breasted girls in tight bikinis announcing the "rounds," nothing about heavy metal, nothing about the pure, testosterone thrill of wanton, metal-ripping destruction. Not even any suggestion --obvious to me -- that there's something inherently Viking about the entire idea of a Monster truck rally.

Instead, we have painfully banal questions such as "Can you get rich putting on these shows?" and "How long is your season?" A country that's capable of producing rap stars whose songs get banned for glorifying drug use should be able to do better.

Nevertheless, the article, or better Rally provides an opporunity for a few German Words of the Week. They sound a bit Hawaiian, but they're quite German. I heard the Vokuhila, for the first time from sometime German Joys contributor Ed Philp.  Then Titanic used it to describe the hairstyle of the American stand-up comedian Bill Hicks. It will surely be on the heads of many people at the Monster Truck Rally.

It's actually an abbreviation for the phrase "Vorne Kurz, Hinten Lang" or "Short in front, long in back."  Business in the front, party in the back, dude.  Canadians call it Hockey hair, Americans call it the mullet. Mulletsgalore has all you need to know, including a nice typology.

Tohuwabohu means a dust-up or ruckus. I first encountered it in a book about the 1970s terrorist organization the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion). They grew out of the Berlin scene in the late 1960s, whose members formed communes, experimented with drugs, organized protests, and did everything else you'd expect. Whenever they were put on trial for one reason or another, their code of honor required them to create Tohuwabohu. They wore skin-tight yellow pants and orange feather boas, they addressed the judge with the familiar du, one of them even hopped up on the prosecutor's desk and crapped on his file.

I hope you enjoyed this weeks exotic new contestants.  Happy First of May!

French Words of the Week

There comes a time in life when you finally settle down into a stable relationship.  The relationship can take many forms: it might be a marriage, might be shacking up.  The point is, you've stopped looking, and you're ready to work on building a life à deux. The French call this stabilisation sentimentale.  According to some French government study, it happens to French men when they're 36 years old, and French women when they're 29.

A concussion is a commotion cérébrale (F).

And now, the pièce de résistance.  What the American military calls an "Improvised Explosive Device," or a homemade bomb, is called, in French, a bombe artisanale.  Add your own cynical jokes in the comments...

German Words of the Week: Schreibtischtäter

This week's GWOW is a triple-combination special.  First, the root: Täter (pronounced as in "Pass the taters, Maw!").

It's derived from the neutral word tun, or "to do."  So a Täter is "doer."  However, a we don't like the things Täter do: they beat people, scratch cars, embezzle money, smuggle drugs, kill animals, burn embassies, and such like. They are criminals.

There are different sorts of Täter. A Triebtäter is someone who'se motivated by unwholesome drives or urges (Treiben), an "urge-criminal," or sex offender. 

You can have some sympathy for an Überzuegungstäter, though.  What he does is, of course, wrong, but he's a "conviction-criminal," operating on the basis of his sincere convictions (Überzeugungen).  This is about the nicest thing you're allowed to call George W. Bush in most German newspapers.

Now to the pièce de résistance: Schreibtischtäter.  We'll need to do some (light) German compound noun math to understand this word

Schreib (write)    X  Tisch (table) = "write-table", or desk.

Now plug the result of the above equation into the next phase:

Schreibtisch (desk)   +    Täter (criminal) = desk-criminal.

A desk-criminal kills with his pen.  He sits at his desk in the Ministry of Internal Security, or Refugee Resettlement, and decides the fate of a single human being -- or thousands of them --with a simple check-mark on a form, or by filing folders in certain cabinets. 

More about a simple "Transportation Administrator" who became history's most notorious Schreibtischtäter here.

German Word of the Week: Lebenskünstler

I've gotten a few emails recently about the distressing lack of "German Words of the Week."  Yes, it's true, I have been neglecting this section of German Joys.  I admit it.  But the neglect ends now.

Oscar Wilde once purportedly said "I put my talent into my work, but my genius into my life."  A suitable introduction to this week's entry, Lebenskünstler.  Literally translated, it means "life-artist."  Non-literally translated, it means, of course, much more. 

A recent documentary broadcast on German television showed recent immigrants to the United States living in the Roosevelt area of Queens. We met an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador who lived in a small part of house and worked in a beauty salon (overseen by another recent immigrant, from Vietnam).  We met a "coyote," who coordinated the smuggling of illegal immigrants to the U.S. 

We then met a Colombian (if memory serves) who had 8 children.  Since he broke his foot when he fell from a building at a construction site, he can no longer work in construction. Instead, he makes his living writing letters for other immigrants who cannot read or write.  They are almost invariably flowery love-letters to wives, girlfriends, or mothers.  (Fans of South American movies will be reminded of the main character in the Brazilian movie Central Station). He wheels himself around the neighborhood to various places where the undocumented gather.  He is always ready with a tale, ever-cheerful despite his precarious financial situation. 

He is a Lebenskünstler.  Someone who pieces together his living from various activities that, collectively, bring in just enough money to live.  No office, no suit, no boss, no rules. German has a word for such people, and English doesn't.  There's even a higher form of Lebenskünstler, and that is the Überlebenskünstler, or "survival artist."   Here we encounter a word that shows that English is, indeed, a Germanic language.   The word Überleben, literally translated, means "overlive," or survive.  It was used this way in John Donne's Seventh Meditation: "my disease cannot survive me, I may overlive it."  Here it is used in German to refer to Africans who are not merely life-artists, but survival-artists.

So, GWOW fans, here is your fix.  I will return to the theme several times this week, to make sure the German Word of the Week remains a Word of the Week, and not a Word of the Month, or worse yet, Year...

German Word of the Week: Schnecke auf Glatteis

Ok, it's a phrase, not a word.  It means "like a snail on a sheet of ice."  I heard it this morning on the local radio call-in show, and was enchanted.  Here's a real-world example which helpfully explains the phrase.  Plus, the example deals with the position of women in Bavarian public-service jobs, which I know has been on all our minds lately. 

Speaking of efforts to promote equality between the sexes in government bureaucracies, Ms. Christa Naaß, chairwoman of some comission or other, says: "The efforts to advance womens' equality in Bavaria are proceeding like a snail on an ice-sheet, incredibly slowly and stubbornly, with lots of sliding to-and-fro!"  Isn't that actually how government bureaucracies operate?

Enough snide quips.  Now to science.  I'm no malacologist, but I believe I am correct in saying that a snail is a mollusc, and molluscs are cold-blooded.  I'm also no iceometrist, but in my experience, ice is generally rather cold.  Therefore, I would imagine that a snail trying to move along on a sheet of ice would soon get very, very, sleepy.  He would probably curl up in his little shell and take a nap until Spring.  Goodbye, snail! 

Until we see you again in the Spring, let's learn a little about your molluscy brother, the sea slug.

German Words of the Week: Erklärungsnot, Sitzfleisch, and Mundtot

It's been a while, but the GWOW is back.  To make up, I'm giving you three for the price of one: Erklärungsnot, Sitzfleisch, and Mundtot.

The words are unrelated, except in that they all highlight German's extraordinary ability to weld together separate units of meaning to form unique and subtle new ideas.  The result says in one word what it would take English at least a phrase, and sometimes a sentence, to say.  To wit:

Erklärungsnot.  Erklärung ("Explanation") + Not ("Emergency").  Explanation-emergency.  The situation you're in when, as we say it in English, you have a lot of explaining to do.  Such as when you've constructed a building of lies.  One sees the word Erklärungsnot frequently in recent discussions of the German Social Democratic Party, which very foolishly withdrew support for its own chairman in the middle of sensitive and demanding coalition negotations.  "We are in explanation-emergency!" say the party members, and what they mean is that half of Germany is saying "What the f%&$ were you thinking?"

Sitzfleisch.  Sitz ("Sitting") + Fleisch ("Meat"). You need a few things to be able to appreciate Richard Wagner.  A refined sensibility (opinions vary), a tolerance for his faux-antique versification, some knowledge of German myth.   But most of all, you need Sitzfleisch, or the ability to sit patiently in an opera seat for about four hours, (of course, there are breaks).  Sitzfleisch also comes in handy when preparing for exams or enduring Germany's famously dull academic conferences and official ceremonies.  In case you're curious, I have kilos of Sitzfleisch for Wagner, but not a gram for these last two.

Mundtot.  Mund ("Mouth") + Tot ("Dead"). This is what autocratic rulers do to people whose opinions they don't fancy; they "make them mouth-dead" with repressive measures and surveillance.  The closest English equivalent would be to "muzzle," which is pretty good in itself, but there's a certain chilling quality to Mundtot that muzzle doesn't quite capture.

German Word of the Week: Gesinnungsfleischwolf

In a recent interview in Der Spiegel (sorry, not free online), Jodie Foster said she found German a very difficult language, but liked the sound of it (or something like that).  Here at German Joys, we agree.  And our new German Word of the Week is proof thereof.

In a recent article in the obscure Krefelder Anzeiger, I came across a sentence containing the GWOW.  It's a combination of two German words, naturally.  The first is Gesinnung, which means something like "conviction" or "worldview" (although there's an even better word for worldview, namely Weltanschauung).  The next word is the word for "meat-grinder" in German.  But it's much more colorful than "meat-grinder."  Fleischwolf, literally translated, is "meat-wolf."  You get the picture.

Anyway, back to the Krefelder Anzeiger.  In an opinion article about the process of forming a new Great Coalition cabinet, the slim, obscure paper had this to say:

Doubtless after the coming weeks of negotiations, both major parties will have to put all their plans and ideals through the meat-grinder of conviction (Gesinnungsfleischwolf), and the result will be a sausage which tastes of the lowest common denominator.

I could again praise the enormous word-combining flexibility of the magical, miracle Lego-language that is German, but I hardly think that's necessary at this point...

   

German Words of the Week: Verunsicherung, verwählen, Verstimmung

In this week's lesson, we learn the extraordinary versatility of the German prefix "ver-"; and we assess the results of yesterday's inconclusive election. 

After some serious setbacks in regional voting for his Social Democratic Party, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder arranged to lose a confidence vote in the German parliament in July.  This enabled him to move forward the date for elections to yesterday, September 18th.  There was about a six-week phase of intense campaigning before the vote.  At first, the conservative candidate, Angela Merkel, had the decisive advantage.  The polls showed her party with a narrow majority when twinned with its preferred coalition partner, the Free Democrats.  She portrayed herself as a bold reformer, with the necessary ideas to break Germany out of its continuing economic stagnation and reduce the nation's 12 percent unemployment.  Part of her plan was to pick Paul Kirchhof, a law professor who had long favored a flat-tax scheme, ably described by Ed Philp in this post.

German Word of the Week: Hurrapatriotismus

It means "rah-rah patriotism" or jingoism; a blind, reckless, willful extolling of the virtues of one's country at the expense of all (or certain) others.  I like it because it evokes a crowd screaming "hurra" after various exhortations; quite a resonant image. 

I am happy to report that there is very little of this indeed left in Germany.  Every card carrying member of the educated classes rejects patriotism with a sneering ferocity that I often find a tad extreme.  But then again, George Bernard Shaw once said "You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race."

I don't have a real-world example at the ready; doubtless many of you readers will.  But what I do have is even better: a description of Hurrapatriotismus from someone who saw it in its rawest form.  I speak of the bilious Englishman Henry Mayhew, who wrote, in 1865, a 2-volume book entiteld German Life and Manners (full title: German Life and Manners, as Seen in Saxony of the Present Day: with an Account of Village Life--Town Life--Fashionable Life--Domestic Life--Married Life--School and University Life, &c, of Germany at the Present Time: Illustrated with Songs and Pictures of the Student Customs at the University of Jena). I previously quoted this masterpiece of cultural chauvinism here.

German Word of the Week: Stoibern

Ahh, Edmund Stoiber [pronounce it "SHTOY-bur"].  He's the Minister-President of Bavaria.  Germany's most prominent conservative, except for Angela Merkel.

And certainly the most despised, as Carl's recent comment, in which he declares he becomes physically ill when hearing Stoiber, indicates. 

I don't know what sparks such animosity toward Stoiber -- I find his Bavarian accent adorable.  And in his funny costumes, he looks just like Germans are supposed to look, for God's sake. 

Plus, his name is just irresistible.  It sounds like a Yiddish insult: "This Finkelstein fellow (says the Jewish paterfamilias), my dear Aviva, you will certainly not marry!  Ach, what a stoiber he is!

German Word of the Week: Marienkäfer

What is it about ladybugs that inspires such affection? 

Is it their pleasingly symmetrical half-oval appearance?  The fact that they don't sting?  The splotchy decorations on their carapace, which resemble a child's first attempt at fingerpainting?  Or perhaps their dogged, mild-mannered way of crawling to the top of whatever they land on, spreading their outer shells to reveal an unexpectedly complex structure of hidden wings, and flying gracefully away?

Whatever the explanation is, people love ladybugs.  Europeans, in fact, put them under the protection of supernatural forces.  In Germany, these critters are called Marienkäfer -- "Mary beetles" (yes, that Mary).

Not to be outdone, the Dutch take ladybug adoration to its logical conclusion.  I have it on good authority from a Belgian friend (and remember, Flemish Belgians don't speak Flemish, they speak Dutch.  Note that well.), that in Dutch, a ladybug is an Onze-lieve-Heersbestje.  Literally translated, "Our-dear-Lordbeastlet", or more flowingly, "the little beast of our dear Lord." 

Almost makes you want to move to Holland (or Belgium), doesn't it?

[Hat tip to PDK]

P.S.  Off to England tomorrow.  Hope to post some updates while I'm there, but in any case check back next week, when I'll resume "providing content."

German Word of the Week: Zukunftsmusik

Thanks for the comments about the Element of Crime post.  Erdmöbel: "earth-furniture?"  Since I am also a big fan of Prefab Sprout, I will be going straight to the store to buy some Erdmöbel.

But now, to the GWOW.  I was spending a normal Saturday morning pursuing one of my favorite hobbies: watching documentaries about advanced weapons systems. 

A U.S. Marine engineer described the possibility of encasing torpedos and perhaps entire submarines in a giant air bubble.  This would allow them to slide through the sea-depths as fast as air bubbles themselves; that is, with practically no resistance at all.  One day, we might see submarines that move almost as quickly as airplanes.  However, the German voice-over cautioned, this idea remains pure Zukunftsmusik (futuremusic). 

dict.leo.org, as helpful as it is stodgy and unimaginative, defines Zukunftsmusik as "dreams of the future."  (Titanic magazine regularly features surreal and dystopian paintings by the artist Nic Schulz entitled Zukunftsmusic, with a "c" at the end.  Creeping Anglicization of the German language, or irony?).

OK, nice, now we understand the basic idea.  But there is a much better English term for this notion, I think.  In fact, there are two.  "Pie-in-the-sky" (adj) and "pipe dream" (noun).  Both of these terms describe a worthwhile, idealistic -- but ultimately unrealizable -- vision.  The ideas discussed in this essay, perhaps, strike me as being in that genre.  But perhaps Zukunftsmusik really means something that is realizable; that will arrive in a few decades, if we only work at it.  A new idea or invention that so close we can almost perceive it -- like far-off music...

German Word of the Week: Spießbürger

First, thanks to all Joysters for the additional German Words of the Week.   Truly the essence of the Internet: the multiplication of individual intelligences and sensibilities into a gigantic Überdialog of diversity.  Or words to that effect.  I have decided that I will choose the GWOW on my own, and let your perceptive comments speak for themselves.  Besides, I have no idea what an Eselsbrücke is.  Yet.

And now, gradually, I come to our fabulous new GWOW: Spießbürger.  This word brings us not only the famous umlaut (two little dots over the u), but an odd new friend, the ß.  It looks like a capital B, but it is actually pronounced pretty normally like an S.  So you pronounce this GWOW "SHPEESE-buerger."  Germans call it an S-Z, or "ess-tzed."  Get to know it.  It's soft and rounded and very friendly.

Spießbürger means, literally, "spear-citizen."  This is not a degrading reference to Africans, it's a degrading reference to Germans.  I'll let the Wikipedia entry for the term speak for itself, in my translation:

A Spießbürger is a pejorative reference to a person who is distinguished by his intellectual stodginess, extreme conformity to social norms, hostility to changes in daily habits and rejection of everything unfamiliar.  At the beginning of the 20th century the short form Spießer [Spearer] and adjective Spießig [speary] were introduced by progressive and left-leaning groups as a Kampfbegriff [struggle-idea!] against the establishment.  The concept dates back to the Middle Ages, when it was used to denote a militia of spear-carrying foot-soldiers composed of ordinary citizens. 

No GWOW would be complete without a real-word example.   Mine comes from an ad for a savings and loan (Sparkasse) that I saw before a recent movie.  At first, you see a hippie encampment.  Perhaps the people are squatters, or maybe it's a commune.  An older counterculture type -- a prototypical anti-Spießer -- wanders through the throng of pot-smoking, drum-playing, tie-dyed, nose-ringed inhabitants.  He's accompanied by his young son.  They sit down, and the old hippie, lookíng a little tired, and very dilapidated, surveys the scene of controlled chaos with the little tyke.  Eventually, the lad looks up at his father with an yearning expression, and says: "Dad, why do Spießer get to live in nice houses?"  Then you see the logo of the savings and loan...

German Word of the Week: Gürteltier

Apparently, the GWOW is one of the most popular features on this site, so in a shameless ploy to maintain my hits, I will give you all the German Words of the Week you can handle!  Hell, if I had enough time, I would give you the German Word of the Hour.

This week's GWOW is a fabulous one.  It is Gürteltier.  It means armadillo in German.  Many European readers might not know what an armadillo is, so here's a picture:

Before I explain why this is the German Word of the Week, I'd like to write a short disquisition on armadillos. Here are three amusing facts about them:

1. They are one of the few non-human animals that can carry leprosy, so they are frequently used for research into this disease.
2. When they are frightened, they tend to jump straight up into the air.  This means when a car approaches, instead of just ignoring it and letting the car pass over them, they jump up and smack right into the bumper.  That explains the hundreds of rotting armadillo carcasses on the side of Texas roads.
3. If you pick one up (hard to do, they run pretty fast), it curls itself into a tight little ball for protection.  You can then play soccer with it.  After you're done, stick around and watch: the armadillo will wait 2 or 3 minutes to make sure the coast is clear, unroll itself, and stroll away as if nothing had happened.

OK, now we've learned a little about armadillos, and we're all the richer for it. 

But why, you're asking impatiently, why is Gürteltier the word of the week?  Because German animal names are comically literal and descriptive. Tier in German means "animal," and Gürtel means "belt."  So an armadillo is a "belt-animal."  Look at the picture. 

And if that's not delicious enough, a skunk is a Stinktier (stink-animal), a predator is a Raubtier (rob-animal), a sloth is a Faultier (lazy-animal).  Mammals are Säugetiere ("suck-animals"), and marsupials are Beuteltiere ("bag-animals").  But my favorite German animal name is for the raccoon.  He looks like a little bear, and always washes what he eats.  Therefore, in German, he's a Waschbär.

German Word of the Week: Affentheater

It all started with a documentary about East German housing policy.  No, really, it did. 

East Germany made a promise to all its citizens that they would have a place to live provided by the State.  That promise was fulfilled with the help of the now-infamous Plattenbau -- literally, "plate-buildings."  These were prefabricated 5-or-6 story apartment houses that sprang up all over the East in socialist times.

You can instantly recognize Plattenbau, because it all looks the same -- buildings composed of interlocking brown pebble-concrete construction units.  It was cheap, it was easy to build, it provided living spaces for humans.  And it was ugly and uniform.  [But before you capitalists begin chuckling about how those poor communists had to live with so much ugly uniformity, remind yourself that a most new structures in the United States are built on the same principles -- a new McDonald's, for instance, arrives prefabricated at the installation site, and takes an average of less than 24 hours to erect.]

The documentary director interviewed one East German city planner, who reported that the government commissioned a report which found that the Plattenbau policy had, perhaps, been too successful.  People were leaving the decaying inner cities to go live in Plattenbau suburbs, which offered more green spaces and often more room.  In fact, more people were leaving the inner cities than the government could build new suburban housing blocks for.  This could lead to housing problems in the socialist paradise, which would be problematic from many perspectives -- social, ideological, etc.

The response to this report, the architect observed with a chuckle, was ein richtiges Affentheater -- "a real monkey-theater."  The closest dict.leo.org online can get to the English meaning is lame substitutes like "complete farce" or "ridiculous business."  But really, does any English phrase convey the glorious image of monkeys dressed in formal costumes jumping about the stage, screeching, howling, and scratching their genitals? 

German Word of the Week: Latte

This is much more than a German word of the week.  It's a story of epic cultural misunderstanding with cross-national sexual overtones.

You wouldn't think so from just looking at the word: Latte.  The ordinary German meaning is "pole."  However -- and this is where you put the kids to bed, 'cause this post's gonna get a little blue -- it's also a slang term for the erect male member.  From this comes the term Morgenlatte -- Latte of the Morning, to put it poetically.

So OK, latte means something like "boner."  Big deal, you might be saying.  Well, think about what you drink in late afternoon, especially if you're in Europe.  Ah yes, an "italian" "caffè latte" would be just the thing.  And, as we all know, most people drop the first word and just order a Latte.

Trust me, this amusing cross-cultural ribaldry provokes any number of winks and sniggers in Germany, usually involving ordering a particularly "creamy" or "stiff" latte.  Here is a more clever recent example from the latest issue of Titanic.  It comes from a section in which ordinary readers write in with wry observations from everyday life.  Someone apparently spent a little time at a singles website and noticed this:

When a woman puts in her online "Flirt-profile" that she loves to get together with her girlfriends from time to time and "lesiurely slurp a Latte," she shouldn't complain when her Inbox fills up with smut...'

German Word of the Week: Jammertal

Jammertal  -- literally, it means "valley of whining."  Here's an example from a recent interview with two people who have been writing about East Germany.  As most of you surely know, the Wall between East and West Germany fell in 1989, and by 1991 a series of contracts and treaties had been signed dissolving the former East Germany.  Under these treaties, the West promised untold billions in assistance to bring East Germany's infrastructure up to date and modernize its industry. 

Unfortunately, things didn't work out as planned: the economy is still lagging far behind the West, brain drain has depleted the East of its most talented residents, and the remaining residents seem to be trapped in a cycle of despair and dependence.  The author Ines Geipel concisely explains (translation courtesy of Sign and Sight) the current condition of Jammertal Ost: "Looked at in broad daylight, East Germany is a pure social desert. The bright flash of clear-minded civil consciousness in autumn of '89 has now flagged, weariness is visible everywhere. All the posts are occupied, the structures are inflexible. The game is up, as they say. A debate on the constitution? Communicating the rule of law and democratic values? It would really take courage, not to mention a good deal of wit, to seriously try to change things now."

To end on a lighter note, let's look at another German phrase.  In the former East, almost everyone could receive West German television and watched it regularly, even though you could get in trouble for doing so.  The only exception was Dresden, where reception was blocked by a mountain chain.  Because Dresdeners were therefore a little out of the loop culturally, the city became known as the Tal der Ahnungslosen, or "Valley of the Clueless."

German Words of the Week: Eisprung & Nervensäge

It's been a while since I brought you a GWOW, so now you get a twofer, courtesy of Anke Groener, who writes a pleasant, lively blog.  In this post, she complains about "female problems":

Anke nölt über die üblichen Eisprungbauchschmerzen: „Der weibliche Körper ist eine einzige Nervensäge.“

First, for comic effect, let me translate this sentence 100% literally:

Anke complains about the usual eggjumpstomachpains: "The female body is one single nerve-saw."

Now, a bit more idiomatic:

Anke complains about the usual ovulation pains: "The female body is nothing but a pain-in-the-ass."

Ovulation, for those of you who've forgotten your high-school biology, is the release of a mature fertilizable egg from the ovary.  The German version is, as usually, a fabulously colorful combination of two words: Eisprung or "egg-jump"!  And could anything better convey annoyance than the image of someone sawing at your nerves?  Almost too horrifyingly expressive, isn't it?

German Word of the Week: Kampflesben

They're big, they have short, spiky hair, and they know what a glasspack is.  The English words for these formidable women are diesel dyke, or (my favorite), tool-belt lesbian.  In German, they are Kampflesben.  That is, "Combat Lesbians."  I would hope there's a brigade of Combat Lesbians in the German army.

Being the broad-minded sort, I've nothing against Combat Lesbians.  A few of them run my neighborhood video store.  Now, to be fair, I can't look inside their brains and tell what their sexual preference is.  But they do advertise exclusively for female counter help, which by theway is perfectly legal here.  Here's another clue.  Whenever I pop in to rent a few DVDs, they almost always accidentally give me one I didn't actually order.  (To choose your DVD, you pull a tiny plastic tag from in front of the box of the DVD you want to watch, and the Combat Lesbian attendant behind the counter fetches the actual disk from a jumble of single discs behind the counter.  Much can go wrong during this process, especially when you're simultaneously smoking, bitching about taxes to someone on the telephone, and wiping a stain off the counter).

Ordinary, the movie I wanted to see is either European art-house fare or obscure Asian horror movies (of which the Combat Lesbians stock a rich assortment).*  The video I actually get, by "mistake," is almost invariably a straight, guns-blazing Hollywood action flick.  (Think Die Harder).

Are they trying to tell me something?

* One movie that my friendly neighborhood Kampflesben turned me on to is the disorienting, surreal South Korean masterpiece Old Boy, winner of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.  Go see it now!

German Word of the Week: Karteileiche

Faithful reader(s), I will be a little bit hard to reach in the coming days and may not be able to give you the German Joys you so richly deserve on a regular basis.  I'll be back in full swing late next week, I promise.  I am working on luring a guest blogger here, we'll see if he takes me up on it.

In the meantime, I give you the new GWW, and what a doozy it is.  Literally translated, it means "file-room corpse."  We're talking about an account or file stored in some kind of bureacratic system that long ago lost all relevance to any thing or object in the outside world.  I most recently heard the word in a discussion of long-term student tuition.  Here where I teach, the schools begin to charge students tuition after something like 5 or 6 years of study.  That may sound generous, but in a country where people routinely stay in college until their mid-30's, it's quite a rude shock to plenty a tenured student.

Perhaps that last sentence should read "stay" in "college," since lots of people maintain a strictly technical status as "student" merely in order to take advantage of student subsidies and discounts.  When presented with a bill for 600 Euro per desultorily-completed semester, many "students" suddenly decided they were ready to move on to the next glorious stage of their existence (that is, unemployment benefits).  As a university bureacrat fondly recounted: "The new tuition rules allowed us to get rid of a lot of Karteileichen." 

(note: special hat-tip to Oliver B. for this one)

German Word of the Week: Lügengebäude

You come home a little bit too late, a little bit too drunk, a little bit too happy. 

The wife eyes you distrustfully and asks what that flowery odor is.  "Aww, we gave a bunsch of flowers to one of the (hic) sexretaries.  Had a little party." 

Is that so.  Well, why didn't you answer when I called you at work? 

"Uhh, you called my office, and we were all in the resheption area drinking shampagne." 

Oh really.  Well, I called the reception area too.  4 times.  The phone rang and rang. 

"Ohh, thassright!  We all went to a bar, thass right.  Freddy's place or something..."

At this point, you are living in what a German would call a Lügengebäude -- a "Building of Lies."  You pronounce it Loo*-gen-guh-BOY-duh.  In English you can, of course, spin a tissue or web of lies.  But I think the idea of crafting a nice, solid, bricks-and-mortar building of lies is more apt.  It conveys how hard it is to get out of one once you've built it. 

I might also add that thinkers who create large, comprehensive philosophical systems -- I need hardly mention which country has the leading reputation here -- build Gedankengebäude, or "Buildings of Thought." 

I'd to extend this a little down the scale.  Can I live in an Apartment of Lies(Lügenwohnung)?  Drive around in a Car of Thought (Gedankenwagen)?  Hand someone a Box of Lies (Lügenschachtel)?  The answer to all of these questions is: of course!  German is, after all, the super-duper ultra-modular Lego language.

* Actually, this pronunciation isn't quite right, since the first ü, which has those two cute dots over it (umlauts), is pronounced a little funny.  Germans claim there's a difference between a regular u and ü.  I thought only dogs could actually hear the difference until I began mixing up Schwül, which means humid, and Schwul, which means homosexual.  I don't know how many times I told people that Texas has extremely homosexual summers.  That got their attention, I must say.

German Word of the Week: Ohrwurm

A song, or an advertising jingle, that invades your consciousness and won't leave.  There's no word for this in English, so here the Germans have the clear linguistic advantage (you can also "pre-pone" an event in German and officially "dis-invite" someone).  Here's where German comes to the rescue, with Ohrwurm, literally "ear-worm."  You can almost picture the cute little fellow camping out in your ear, singing the inane ditty over and over, cheerfully evading your increasingly desperate attempts to silence him.

I want hereby to start an official campaign to bring Ohrwurm into English.  Shouldn't be too difficult.  Just start telling your friends "Crap, that new Danii Minogue single is such an earworm."  When they ask you what an earworm is, tell them, and urge them to start using it in their normal conversation.  Note to entrepreneurs: trademark the word "Earworm" while it's hot!  While on the subject, German has a word for a song that is popular for matter of weeks and then drops into the memory hole.  It's an Eintagsfliege (One-day-fly), named for the sort of flies that live only a few hours (English: Mayflies; Latin -- pricelessly -- Ephemeroptera).  One-day-fly doesn't really work in English, so let's just call these songs...Ephemeroptera.  OK, perhaps not.

German Word of the Week: Gebetsmühlenartig

There's an active debate on the meaning of this word here on the online dictionary dict.leo.org (partially in English).  Literally translated, it means "prayer-wheel-like," (i.e., like a Tibetan prayer wheel) a bit more colloquial would be "like a mantra." 

It's the way you describe the empty, obligatory phrases that litter political discussion -- cliches that nobody explains or explores, but are repeated as a source of comfort and to indicate that the speaker is a responsible type.  A German example would be: "We need urgent action to combat unemployment!" or "We must keep in mind our nation's problematic history..."

My candidates for English equivalents: "Children are our future."  "This problem can only be solved by bipartisan cooperation," and, in certain circles: "Come back with a search warrant."

I'm off to Luebeck, Germany for a meeting of the German University Association.  No, really!  I'll be back on Wednesday, loyal reader(s).

German Word of the Week I: Verniemandung

It means "Nobody-ification." Strictly speaking, it’s not really  proper German.  The definition will be provided by the German satirist Eckhard Henscheid (link in German, he's unfortunately unknown outside of Germany).  In 1985, Henscheid opened up the German front in the War on Crap with “Dummdeutsch” (Idiot German), a dictionary of moronic new phrases from the worlds of academia, business, and sport.  Take it away, Hensch:

Verniemandung.  The well-known author and editor of the works of Hölderlin D.E. Sattler bemoaned in the Frankfurter Rundschau the “nobody-ification” … of Germans through the advertising campaign of Egon Hölder, Director of the Federal Statistics Agency. The ads reassured Germans “Your name helps us count and will later be destroyed.” 

Granted, not an especially clever formulation.  But then again, not everyone is a Hölderlin, or his editor. Through sentences like “it was an attack on the productive imagination, that lies in the non-n