The image of Seilschaften, of a group of mountain-climbers connected by a rope, is as frequently used in German political discourse (both verbal and visual) as cricketing terminology in British. One common use is to represent self-interested political actors who look out for each other reciprocally. But the Greek crisis puts me to mind of a different sense of the term. The nations of the EU climbing the mountain of prosperity. Greece is lagging, but is also stuck in a position where it is blocking other members of the party. So they offer generous assistance, just long enough to manoeuvre it into a place where they can cut the rope and let it fall into the chasm without taking anyone else with it. Of course, there’s the extra piquancy that Europe’s leaders were primarily protecting private banks rather than their citizens and taxpayers.
Tag: language
German default
Following up on the previous post, it occurred to me that I don’t know any German counterpart to the English verb “default”, as in, “default on a loan”. After some searching, I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t one. In German there can be a default — “Ausfall” — or the loan can passively fail — “ausfallen”, literally the loan can “malfunction”, or “be cancelled”. But the debtor cannot as the active subject of the sentence do the defaulting.
Irritating false friends
According to Reuters the German Bundestag member Volker Kaude described the new proposals for the Greek financial crisis from European Commission president Juncker as “irritating”. It’s an odd word choice. It would be quite exceptionally blunt if he had said it. Of course, he didn’t.
Turning to German-language media we see that what he actually said was that he was “einigermaßen überrascht über die irritierenden Aussagen aus Brüssel”. “Fairly surprised by the odd comments from Brussels.” “Irritierend” looks like “irritating”, but its primary meaning — and clearly the one intended here — is something more like “puzzling”. It’s diplomatic for having a range of meanings from neutral to negative. I don’t get it, and I don’t think it’s entirely my fault.
Reuters might need to invest in something more sophisticated than Google for its translations.
Aggressive passive voice
A front-page article in yesterday’s Times attacks Labour’s election strategy as having been too left-wing. Much of it is framed as a family feud, with David Miliband expressing retrospectively his certainty that his brother Ed was leading the party — and the nation — to disaster. But beyond this hyper-personalisation, we also have remarks that combine anonymity and the passive voice in an effort to make special interests sound oracular:
One of Labour’s most generous private donors warned Mr Miliband that the party was seen as too anti-business and that the mansion tax was “completely insane”.
Here we have a completely disinterested ordinary citizen — an exceptionally “generous” one — reporting that, regardless of his own personal opinions on the matter, he had found that Britons from all walks of life from his broad social group, were united in finding Labour too “anti-business”. At gatherings in their modest Chelsea flats, they agreed that none of them could see any rational purpose in taking extra taxes from people on the completely adventitious pretext that they happen to have big houses. (What’s next? Taxing people with big ears? Why wasn’t that proposed under Red Ed?)
So then we have an anonymous claim about how Labour is “seen” by unnamed other people, on the basis of investigations not specified, being delivered to us in a front-page report in the Times. Presumably this has something to do with the man’s generosity…
More self-deconstructing clichés: Europe edition
I have commented before (here and here) on the weird linguistic phenomenon of clichés being modified to eliminate their actual meaning. Here is an example from yesterday’s BBC report on David Cameron’s attempts to convince other European leaders to support his efforts to rescue his leadership of a fractured Conservative Party reform the European Union:
This was a chance to try to repair burned bridges.
The whole idea of the expression “burn your bridges” is that THERE’S NO MORE BRIDGE! You can’t repair it! Sure, in reality a burned bridge might not have burned completely, so repairs could still be undertaken. But why invoke a metaphorical burned bridge if you actually mean to play down the burn?
What is the writer thinking? “Many people complain that David Cameron has burned his bridges to fellow European leaders. While this is true, those bridges are constructed largely of metaphorical stone, so the damage from burning is not nearly as great as if they had been constructed of metaphorical wood, and repairs are still eminently possible.
“Some in the Conservative Party argue for dynamiting the main pylons of the metaphorical bridges. Metaphorically.”
One might similarly tell of how Alexander the Great, on arriving in Persia, ordered that the ships be burned. But only on the edges, of course, because otherwise they would no longer be seaworthy.
Social climber
What is it about rock climbing that makes it such a useful synecdoche for enjoying your life? In an article about an unusual case about a girl whose lawsuit against a sexually abusive teacher foundered when her claims of “loss of enjoyment of life” seemed to be contradicted by a happy Facebook page, I was struck by the comment
Melissa’s account was mostly locked to outsiders, but some pictures were visible: Melissa hanging out with her boyfriend, Melissa working at a veterinary hospital, Melissa rock climbing, Melissa out drinking with friends… Nor did it support her claim of “loss of enjoyment of life,” which one judge has defined as the loss of “watching one’s children grow, participating in recreational activities, and drinking in the many other pleasures that life has to offer.” Rock climbing is a recreational activity; drinking with friends is one of life’s pleasures, after all. Last month, the court ordered Melissa to hand over every photograph, video, status update, and wall message ever posted on her Facebook accounts so that the school district may search for more clues that Melissa is secretly thriving.
And that reminded me of an article many years ago in Harper’s about American casualty adjustors, whose job it is to put a price on someone’s life for purposes of wrongful death suits.
I ask them to evaluate my worth, and they tell me that outdoorsy people are worth more than people like me, who stay home and read. “People have no sympathy for somebody who sits alone on his couch, drinks beer, eats food, and is a load,” Ed says.
“That’s why nobody likes me,” says George. “It’s how sympathetic you are. People go, ‘He rock climbed,’ you know. `This guy enjoyed life. He was out there doing things.’ You cherish life more if you are interacting with it.”
Always the Jews…
I can’t help wondering: Can it be a coincidence that when an Islamist extremist decides to shift from attacking Jewish institutions to planning mass slaughter at churches — a plot which seems to have been foiled only because the shooter accidentally shot himself first, and called an ambulance — he chooses as his target a town called Villejuif?
Every three minutes
From a Guardian article on a new theory about the aetiology of Alzheimer disease:
It is thought that this year one person every three minutes will develop dementia.
It’s hard to explain statistics in a way that they feel real to people, but is “one person every three minutes” really a useful way to think about a disease that develops gradually over many years, as opposed to, say, muggings? Perhaps they meant to say “one person every three minutes will be diagnosed with dementia”.
Truth and typeface
In an article about a performance by Allen Ginsberg 50 years ago in the Albert Hall, we read
Ms Leavey, who has listened to a recording of the event made by the BBC but never used in its entirety, said that Ginsberg faced a torrent of heckles, the clearest of which was a reference to an earlier recital by Christopher Logue, who had been on stage performing translations of Sophocles.
One wonders who was the author of Sophocles, and which language it was translated from.
Interestingly, I note that the online version does not put Sophocles in italics. It’s an interesting example of where typeface, like punctuation, can make hash of an otherwise accurate statement.
The reign in New Spain
There’s nothing funny about the never-ending drought in California, but I couldn’t help being amused by the misspelling of the word “rain” — sorry, “rein” — in this Slate article about the lack of rain:
These moves are small potatoes compared to what’s needed to reign in statewide water use, of which agriculture forms the vast majority.
I think what strikes me here is that “reign” is such an oddly spelled word in English, with its vestigial silent ‘g’. Why would you want to put it in when you don’t need it?
The “small potatoes” cliché in a sentence about big agriculture is the icing on the cake. Or the manure on the strawberries. Or something…
Common Infirmities 