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Journalism of Courage
While going through an obituary editorial in The Indian Express last week on Sylvester daCunha, the creator of the ‘Utterly Butterly’ ponytailed Amul girl, I encountered zeitgeist. Of course, a search for the crisp-sounding word was worth the exercise. And that led me to a whole lot of other German coinages that sit pretty in the English vocabulary.
Considering the cultural importance of the German people in Europe and the world, and the large number of German immigrations into America, it is perhaps surprising to find that German borrowings in the English vocabulary have not been as expansive as those from Greek, Latin and French.
However, the German words that we often use without being aware of its origin do carry some punch.
We look at some of them relating to science and technology, food and drink, from pre and post World War II phases, and some other miscellaneous words.
Since the Middle Ages, German technology has been extraordinarily influential, particularly in the field of mining and related industries. Cobalt, a metallic element, has an interesting etymology. It comes from German kobalt, originally kobolt, meaning goblin – a mythical underground demon. The early miners referred to cobalt ore as kobolt because it seemed to maliciously spoil the purity of silver ores with which it was found.
Another metallic element, nickel, too has a similar story behind its name. It comes from Swedish nickel which is shortened from German kupfernickel, literally copper (kupfer)-demon (nickel). This was so called by copper miners because nickel ore looked deceptively like copper ore.
Pitchblende, from which uranium was first isolated, too comes from German pechblende (pech for pitch and blende for any of the sulphide ores all of which have a metallic lustre). Quartz, feldspar, zinc, and many other mining-related words, too have German origins.
Among the commonly used scientific terms borrowed from German are diesel, Fahrenheit, Doppler effect, menthol, enzyme, Bunsen burner, etc. Among these, three are eponyms. Go look for Daniel Fahrenheit, Christian Johann Doppler and Robert Wilhelm Bunsen.
The culinary jargon too will taste insipid in the absence of German borrowings.
Delicatessen comes from delicatessen, meaning delicacies. In English, it stands for a shop that sells a variety of prepared foods like cheese, cold meat, sandwich, particularly the types imported in India from abroad.
Hamburger, pretzel, lager (beer) and noodle are among other gifts that German has given to the foodies around the world.
A rather dubious distinction that the land of the famed autobahn claims is its fair share of war words.
Words like blitzkrieg, strafe, flak, panzer, etc got entered English jargon during the two World Wars. I will write more about such words next week.
Kitsch in German means something which is trashy or junk, often used to refer to bad art. In English, it refers to objects, writings, or any other cultural products or activities that are either in ordinary cheap taste or in a kind of self-conscious and sophisticated bad taste that some find amusing.
Leitmotif or its exact German spelling leitmotiv is the recurrent musical theme in Wagnerian (after Richard Wagner) opera. In the English language, therefore, it means any recurring theme, emotion or pattern of a character in a book or a work of art.
Are you familiar with glitch, muesli, rucksack, kindergarten, poodle, realpolitik, swindle, waltz, snorkel, dachshund, dollar? All are German borrowings.
The sentence in the above-mentioned editorial that had me exploring read: “While selling butter, she became a reflection of, and a barometer for, a country’s zeitgeist.” That’s what daCunha’s girl does. Every day, she talks to you from newspaper columns, comments on the political issue of the day, coaxes the people’s conscience and, very often, gives us a good laugh.
Formed from German words zeit, meaning time, and geist, spirit or ghost, zeitgeist, according to the Oxford Dictionary, means the general mood or quality of a particular period of history, as shown by the ideas and beliefs common at the time.
