Hope meets reality

This is the December version of the political threads that we have had since the end of August—I can't believe that it has been that long!

Word of the month: Dolchstoßlegende

Word of the Month: Index

Our word of the month is composed of three compounds: Dolch (dagger), Stoß (stab, thrust), and Legende (legend, myth). It means literally "dagger stab legend (or myth)". The phrase has its origin in the aftermath of WWI: Reactionaries of various stripes claimed that Germany lost the war not on the battlefields, but on the home front, where socialists, communists, liberal democrats, or Jews (i.e. all the usual bugaboos of the German right at the time) "stabbed the fighting troops in the back" by sabotaging the war effort (through strikes, anti-war writings etc.).

The term is now generally used to characterize efforts to assign blame for a lost cause not to the real culprits, but to those that the blamers consider their adversaries. Right now, we can observe a Dolchstoßlegende in the making when we follow right-wing commentators trying to blame the outcome of the recent election not on the deficiencies of the McCain campaign, but on the (alleged) pro-Obama stance of the so-called "liberal media".



Addendum: Dolchstoßlegenden after the 2016 election.

Cross-cultural idioms

In a prior thread, we briefly touched on cross-cultural idioms, a topic I find endlessly fascinating. I have always wanted to turn this into a full-fledged thread, and now I got beaten to the punch (an idiom, BTW, that does not exist in German).

Food shmooze

No matter what topic we start with, talk will turn eventually to food (happens on Rex's xword blog, too). Mac's mentioning of Grünkohl, Dutch version, in the "Hope won!" thread made not only my mouth water, but also that of another reader (see the first comment). So, let's move the food talk to this new thread and continue with politics on the preceding one (eventually, we'll have to create a new political thread, too. But as long as the old one stays "above the fold", I don't see the need for starting a new one).

Hope won!

Pictures of Americans crying for joy are going around the world and reactions from all over the world are pouring in: The image of America has changed literally over night. What a night, what a day after!

Word of the month: Maulfaul, mundfaul

Maulfaul—or mundfaul—is an adjective adding faul ("lazy") to Maul ("mouth" of animals) or Mund ("mouth" of people). It literally means "mouth-lazy" and could be translated as "uncommunicative" or "taciturn". But it connotes taciturnity with an attitude, the result of boredom, or an expression of passive resistance. You could call a student who answers a question by a teacher with a shrug "uncommunicative", but maulfaul captures the underlying attitude in a more graphic way, calling up the image of a mouth too lazy to move. That's why I'm fond of the word.

Word of the month: Schnulze

So far, all Words of the Month have been compounds that hitch together two seemingly unrelated nouns. This month, I’m introducing a word of a different kind, a neologism that could join the well-established kitsch and schmalz ("shmaltz" in its Yiddish form) to indicate excessive sentimentality in art. Schnulze, in particular, refers to an overly sentimental pop song. I love the word because of its onomatopoetic expressiveness: It mimics the sobbing it’s intended to induce.

Note on pronunciation: The word consists of two syllables—Shnool-tsah—where the "oo" is short as in "foot".