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Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Word of the Month: Der Platzhirsch
Word of the Month: Index
Platz means "place" in a very broad sense—it can be a location, a position (like in a hierarchy), a space occupied by or reserved for someone, or a (city) square. A Hirsch is a male deer, i.e., a stag. Platzhirsch in the original sense is a hunting or forestry term that refers to the dominant stag in an area who lays claim to the resident hinds when they are in heat and fights off all competitors. It's used figuratively to indicate the leader of a group who claims all the rights and privileges such a position entails. In English, we would say he is the "alpha dog."
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Word of the Month: Treppenwitz
Word of the Month: Index
A Treppe is a stair(case), and Witz means "joke." In combination, they indicate an event that, in retrospect, looks like a bad joke because it had completely unintended, negative consequences—it's an initiative that backfired in a way that would be funny, if it weren't so serious. The term can be applied to a wide range of situations, from personal predicaments to the ironies of history. An example would be the hiring of a new CEO for a troubled company who was expected to turn it around, but leads it into bankruptcy instead—the hiring becomes a Treppenwitz in retrospect.
But what in the world does a staircase have to do with something that turns out to be a failure in the end? In order to understand this, one has to know the term's history. It is a translation of the French phrase l'esprit de l'escalier ("wit of the staircase"), which was coined in the 18th century and refers to a clever rejoinder or reposte one thinks about too late, i.e., after one has already reached the bottom of the stairs on one’s way home from a party [Source]. L'esprit de l'escalier became Treppenwitz in the German translation, where Witz was used not in the sense of "joke," but in the sense of "cleverness" or "wit." But that meaning has become, by now, secondary to "joke" and along with this, a Treppenwitz came to be understood not as a clever retort thought of too late, but as something that looks like a bad joke in retrospect. When you hear someone speak of a Treppenwitz in present-day Germany, you can be sure that the latter is the intended meaning.
A Treppe is a stair(case), and Witz means "joke." In combination, they indicate an event that, in retrospect, looks like a bad joke because it had completely unintended, negative consequences—it's an initiative that backfired in a way that would be funny, if it weren't so serious. The term can be applied to a wide range of situations, from personal predicaments to the ironies of history. An example would be the hiring of a new CEO for a troubled company who was expected to turn it around, but leads it into bankruptcy instead—the hiring becomes a Treppenwitz in retrospect.
But what in the world does a staircase have to do with something that turns out to be a failure in the end? In order to understand this, one has to know the term's history. It is a translation of the French phrase l'esprit de l'escalier ("wit of the staircase"), which was coined in the 18th century and refers to a clever rejoinder or reposte one thinks about too late, i.e., after one has already reached the bottom of the stairs on one’s way home from a party [Source]. L'esprit de l'escalier became Treppenwitz in the German translation, where Witz was used not in the sense of "joke," but in the sense of "cleverness" or "wit." But that meaning has become, by now, secondary to "joke" and along with this, a Treppenwitz came to be understood not as a clever retort thought of too late, but as something that looks like a bad joke in retrospect. When you hear someone speak of a Treppenwitz in present-day Germany, you can be sure that the latter is the intended meaning.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Word of the Month: Sündenbock
Sünden means "sins," and a Bock is a male goat in this context. Sündenbock is used in German in exactly the same way in which "scapegoat" is used in English: It denotes a person who has been falsely accused of a misdeed and subsequently ostracized within a group, with the intent to turn suspicion away from the real culprits.
That these terms have the same meaning in the respective languages is not surprising because both have their origin in a ritual described in the Old Testament. On the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), the High Priest puts his hands on a goat in order to transfer the sins of the people of Israel onto the animal and then has it, and with it the sins of the congregation, chased into the wilderness. [Leviticus 16, 21-22]
[Source: Wild Things in the German Language: Kindle/paperback version | iBooks version]
Monday, July 1, 2013
Words of the month: Sippenhaft, Sippenhaftung
Word of the Month: Index
A Sippe is an extended family, a clan. Haftung means "liability" and Haft "imprisonment" or "confinement." Sippenhaft and Sippenhaftung refer to the principle that every member of a clan can be held responsible for any crime committed by another clan member. It was practiced in the Middle Ages in German-speaking countries and is also known from other cultures. It is fundamentally in conflict with the modern notion that individuals can be punished only for acts they committed themselves, which did not prevent the Nazis from reviving Sippenhaft as a means to terrorize the population. [Source]
Why do I bring up this seemingly outdated notion? It’s because I see Sippenhaft, in a vastly extended form, at work wherever I look. For example, the Boston bombers explicitly justified their actions against Americans with the claim that (other) Americans had committed crimes against Muslims. Conversely, more than one Sikh was murdered in the aftermath of 9/11 by an American who considered wearing a turban and a beard a sure sign that someone was a Muslim. In both examples, the killers were willing to ‘murder the innocent,’ and this makes this modern form of Sippenhaft so repulsive to me. In traditional societies that subscribed to Sippenhaft, the member of a clan who committed a crime or who was aware of a crime committed by a relative knew, at least, what was coming, whereas the spectators at the Boston Marathon did not.
Sippenhaft in its extended form becomes grotesque when one realizes that a person typically belongs to more than one group. Take me as an example: I’m male; I’m German; and I may be perceived as being a Christian. This may make me simultaneously the target of certain feminists; of people who suffered under the atrocities committed by Germans all over Europe during WWII; and of radical Islamists. Never mind that I oppose patriarchy in all its forms; abhor the German war crimes; and am appalled by the conduct of Western powers in the Muslim world, from the Crusades to recent times.
A Sippe is an extended family, a clan. Haftung means "liability" and Haft "imprisonment" or "confinement." Sippenhaft and Sippenhaftung refer to the principle that every member of a clan can be held responsible for any crime committed by another clan member. It was practiced in the Middle Ages in German-speaking countries and is also known from other cultures. It is fundamentally in conflict with the modern notion that individuals can be punished only for acts they committed themselves, which did not prevent the Nazis from reviving Sippenhaft as a means to terrorize the population. [Source]
Why do I bring up this seemingly outdated notion? It’s because I see Sippenhaft, in a vastly extended form, at work wherever I look. For example, the Boston bombers explicitly justified their actions against Americans with the claim that (other) Americans had committed crimes against Muslims. Conversely, more than one Sikh was murdered in the aftermath of 9/11 by an American who considered wearing a turban and a beard a sure sign that someone was a Muslim. In both examples, the killers were willing to ‘murder the innocent,’ and this makes this modern form of Sippenhaft so repulsive to me. In traditional societies that subscribed to Sippenhaft, the member of a clan who committed a crime or who was aware of a crime committed by a relative knew, at least, what was coming, whereas the spectators at the Boston Marathon did not.
Sippenhaft in its extended form becomes grotesque when one realizes that a person typically belongs to more than one group. Take me as an example: I’m male; I’m German; and I may be perceived as being a Christian. This may make me simultaneously the target of certain feminists; of people who suffered under the atrocities committed by Germans all over Europe during WWII; and of radical Islamists. Never mind that I oppose patriarchy in all its forms; abhor the German war crimes; and am appalled by the conduct of Western powers in the Muslim world, from the Crusades to recent times.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Learning a Foreign Language Through Poetry
Guest post by Laraine Flemming
Laraine's text is longer than my usual posts and therefore opens in a new window.
I wholeheartedly agree with her assessment of the value of memorizing poems, not only to assist in learning a foreign language, but also to make you appreciate the finer points of your own language. I believe I have an ear for the rhythm and melody that can be achieved in a text, and I think one reason is that we had to memorize poems in school and recite them aloud. That way, I started to see the expressive potential of different meters and to the present day, I 'hear' the sentences that I write down. I attribute this directly to my experience with reciting poems.
To me, the claim that one doesn't learn anything from memorizing poems is dubious, to say the least. It's just one of the many ways in which education has been dumbed down over the last decades based on spurious claims that do not hold up to scrutiny.
Laraine's text is longer than my usual posts and therefore opens in a new window.
I wholeheartedly agree with her assessment of the value of memorizing poems, not only to assist in learning a foreign language, but also to make you appreciate the finer points of your own language. I believe I have an ear for the rhythm and melody that can be achieved in a text, and I think one reason is that we had to memorize poems in school and recite them aloud. That way, I started to see the expressive potential of different meters and to the present day, I 'hear' the sentences that I write down. I attribute this directly to my experience with reciting poems.
To me, the claim that one doesn't learn anything from memorizing poems is dubious, to say the least. It's just one of the many ways in which education has been dumbed down over the last decades based on spurious claims that do not hold up to scrutiny.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Word of the Month: Unglücksrabe
A Pechvogel was the first 'compound creature' I drew and posted on my blog. I'm finally getting around to giving him a companion in misery. Unglück is the opposite of Glück (good fortune, luck), and we encountered a Rabe (raven) already in connection with Rabeneltern. Like a Pechvogel, an Unglücksrabe is a person who has run into some misfortune—he and a Pechvogel are partners in bad luck.
The most famous Unglücksrabe in German literature is Hans Huckebein, the anti-hero of a story told in pictures by Wilhelm Busch. I have to do some more research to find out why ravens are associated with bad luck in this expression.
[Source: Wild Things in the German Language: Kindle/paperback version | iBooks version]
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Word of the Month: Buchschmuck
We know by now that a Buch is a book. Schmuck means "jewelry", both the precious stuff you possess and the stuff you use to accessorize your person. The Schmuck in Buchschmuck is of the second kind: It's the sum of the graphical elements that have been added to a book's pages to enhance the status of the book as an artifact—the decoration of the title page; the special treatment of the first letters of a chapter etc. These features are not to be confused with illustrations intended to support the text—they have a practical purpose, Buchschmuck has not, in the narrow sense. It does not contribute to our understanding of the text, but it may contribute significantly to our enjoyment of the book as an object—it makes it more precious. I show, as an example, on the left the title pages of the edition of the Grimms' fairy tales that motivated me, in second grade, to teach myself the old-fashioned font called Fraktur in German.
I must confess that I have not seen the term Buchschmuck used in a long time. It sounds old-fashioned, harking back to a time when books were objects that could be considered precious. Are these days gone? Or, to put it differently, could eBooks have Buchschmuck? More generally, could they become carefully-crafted objects to be appreciated as such? I see no reason, in principle, why they couldn't.
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