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Originally Posted by SaintessHeart
I read that one a long time ago, it is hilarious.  In today's context (or maybe in the context of the time during the Weimar Republic), that essay would have been called an attempt at flammenkrieg. |
As hilarious as it is, it shows how complicated the language is. When I was reading the direct translation of the fishwife tale I realized how nonsensical the usage of articles is - for a non-native speaker (more often than not articles seem to be chosen to flow with the phonetics of the noun rather than its' meaning or because of other aspects, like e.g. diferentation between "das Mädchen" the girl (singular) and "die Mädchen" the girls (plural)).
By the way, the direct translation of flame war doesn't work (lets say I've never heard it yet). Dict.cc translates it into "unsachliche Auseinandersetzung mit persönlichen Beleidigungen" which basically describes whats happening. In fact there is a word in german that describes this sufficiently: Verbalattacke.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SaintessHeart
Of course, there are even worse German words I can think of, like
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Which is the reason why there exists many substitutes for it. I'ld even take a bet on it and claim that "Nippel" (germanized nipple - but also has another meaning fitting/union) is at least 2 times more often used than "Brustwarze" in the literature... and in spoken german anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SaintessHeart
Nonetheless, I find that the longer terms are, or more ambiguous the combination of words used, the more likely it is going to refer to something atrocious or incredibly silly. Like "political correctness" (which form of politics is correct anyway?), "quantitative easing" (it means printing money, but I used it to refer to flat-chested girls when I am with my friends), or sometimes in the form of acronyms like COICA (it seems to be pronounced like "cocker", and the rationale behind that IS certainly dangling nuts).
What is wrong with keeping things simple (unless you are talking about it in the context of technical science and engineering, or simply want to annoy the heck for the sake of non-serious lulz)?
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I wouldn't say political correctness. Its more like elitism. Even for the average german native speaker these terms are a nuisance, because they are hard to read and even hard to understand.
Now I am not saying impossible to understand or very hard to understand (as single word)... but consider this:
You are reading a law, and every 4th or 5th word is such a construction. When you start to decipher the last word of the sentence, you've basically already forgotten how it started. And the overall length of these sentences (1 paragraph) and the structuring doesn't help either. So, many people (that includes me) have to read these sentences 3 or more times to actually understand them in its entirety.
Such constructs do not speak a language of understanding. Which is especially unnerving since they are used allover in laws and contracts. Something everyone should be able to understand.
Now, most german lawyers will tell you that this is a necessity, because otherwise the correctness, completeness and precission of what is said cannot be guaranteed.
I say, that is a bullshit excuse for elitism. I have yet to stumble over such a monstrosity that I cannot transform in a simpler, easier to understand form without loosing information of the original or adding information to it.
It just takes a lot of my time to restructure it - probably the same time the author needed to encode that monster.