Germany 101
Deutschlisch
Those stupid (germanized) anglicisms!
I was watching a late night show on German TV the other night and the host was interviewing a famous German actor about his new projects. It was then that he used a verb greenlighten, or to be even more precise a beautiful German past tense form of the verb: gegreenlightet. I am a huge fan of ingenious neologisms but does the German language have to absorb English words only? English words most of which have neat German equivalents. It’s always the same scheme: we take an English word that sounds ‘fancy’ and germanize it by adding appropriate endings. Boring!!
Discussion
6 comments for “Those stupid (germanized) anglicisms!”
Post a comment
Subscribe
Categories
- No categories
Links
© 2010 Miss-Verständnis. 
You’re back blogging??
)) Great!!! I missed you lots!!!
Kisses from Argentina! :-*
It’s annoying. They have a perfectly good word for this (probably several).
I am surprised that an actor said that. “Greenlighten” is a wonderful peacock word for corporate hinterbaenkler tie-guys!
[...] already complained a lot before about the way the Germans let the English words pollute their language but I’m still amazed all over again at some really not very well thought of instances of this [...]
Okay- I give in. Though it has been a while (40+ years!) since I was a student there; and it is most definitely the case that the German language can say in one word what takes a phrase or more in English, I do not know what can be substituted for this or “get the go-ahead” more concise than greenlighten! Do enlighten!
[...] am a real fan of the German language and find it annoying how it seems to “swallow” all kinds of unnecessary English rubbish so I was pleased to see the nice, local expression Frohe Stunde, instead of the much more common in [...]