Observing Hermann...

We had something like a Denglish party yesterday. We were watching a little TV and suddenly decided to start counting all the English-lingua-franca-Euro-idiomatic terms or whatever it is you want to call them terms we could find while switching around channels and gave up after about twenty minutes. Es war like absolutely unglaublich. Even Hermann was shocked. And he’s the worst (as in best) Denglish speaker I know.

I mean, it’s well known that English has successfully infiltrated the native speech patterns of natives here and  there all over the world and all but it’s one thing if you want to try and express some new marketing concepts or some new technical development and quite another when you can’t order a pizza anymore because you (as a native English speaker) don’t understand the English terms they are using to describe what’s supposed to be on it (the damned pizza, I mean). It’s a two-edged sword, you see.

But hey, that’s the Entwicklung (development). I’m just going to have to live with it – like the rest of us i.e. you. And besides, I for one refuse to speak German “in accordance with its syntactical norms”, whatever that means. This may sound arrogant but it really isn’t because I also refuse to speak English in accordance with its syntactical norms. I guess there’s no need for me to expect this from anybody else.  

Or how did Gayle Tufts, the American entertainer popular here in Berlin, put it? “Dinglisch is eine ganz besondere Sprache, it’s halvest Deutsch halvest English and basically what most Americans speaks for the first zehn bis fünfzehn Jahre that we live here in Deutschland.”

Hey, da werde ich ja richtig enthusiastic.

Deutsche Kommentare? Absolutely!