Word Dominance
by Caitlin Leffel
I have a confession to make. It's something that I'm a little ashamed of, actually, and that I have no good excuse for. When I was approached to write an article on the theme of zeitgeist, I had to look it up. Though I've heard the word used plenty of times, I'd never been able to suss out its meaning by the context; my standard response had been to ignore it and nod my head. Thanks to a few months of free German classes I took at an old job, I knew how to pronounce it, I knew how it would be spelled, and—this is the really embarrassing part—I'm pretty sure I've even used it in a sentence a few times. But I would never have been able to pinpoint its exact meaning: the experience of a dominant cultural climate that defines an era.
Schadenfreude is another word like that. Oh, I've nodded along to that one plenty of times. Actually, I feel like there's schadenfreude all over the place these days. It's been drizzled all over the kinds of high-brow pop culture that people like me ingest: The Simpsons, West Wing, Avenue Q, Sarah Silverman's stand-up comedy, and the liberal news parody, The Colbert Report. Recently, in the Styles section of the New York Times, an article about a book of pictures of celebrities kissing by event photographer Patrick McMullan commented that though the relationships between many of the couples have since soured, "Mr. McMullan presents the images without schadenfreude." I'm sure Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton were relieved to hear that. Loosely translated from German, schadenfreude means taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune. But that's not what it really means, in this country. It really means "I am educated and cultured, and so witty that I can use big words and look cool." "Schadenfreude" is the new Seinfeld, as it were.
Ersatz is another word like that. I finally looked it up, and it means, of all things, "alternative." How anti-climactic is that? I thought it was something used to describe one of those sexy, lethargic, European moods, something along the lines of malaise or ennui. And gestalt? I found it listed in the three dictionaries that I looked in, but I don't think that any of the people who wrote the definitions would have been able to use it in a sentence. (Though at least they probably know that it's a noun, not an adjective.) The simplest definition, "an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts," from the Oxford English dictionary seemed to me in itself a concept so uncommonly abstract to the degree that its meaning exceeds that accepted capacity of a single English word. (And P.S.: the literal meaning of gestalt in German is "form" or "shape.")
Which brings me to my point: What are all of these complicated, not quite translatable words doing here? Of course, English has no shortage of German words, appropriated or otherwise. English is itself a Germanic language (as oppose to Latin-based Romance languages, for instance), and the two languages share the roots of many words, though spellings and pronunciations differ. There are also plenty of words we've borrowed from the German language and integrated seamlessly into our own: kitsch, flak, kaput, schmutz, along with a long list of food terms (pretzel, delicatessen) and dog names (dachshund, schnauzer, rottweiler). But the meanings and connotations of these words are at least familiar enough by intuition to most Americans that they can be used freely, much like the terms "cul-de-sac," "rendez-vous," "a la mode," and "RSVP." Even if their literal translation isn't known, or has changed, they have a specific, understood meaning in English. Ordering a hamburger in a restaurant is not the same as lamenting schadenfreude on prime time TV. So why the fervor now for these alien terms˜the ones that have no solid English translation or equivalent, and which retain a distinct foreignness with every self-conscious use?
One is that they fit right into the trend du jour of mixing unlikely or contradictory elements. Pairing German words with English words in a sentence is the vernacular version of the über-trendy (to borrow another German term) phenomenon, the "high-lo blend": shabby chic; jeans & heels; Isaac Mizrahi for Target. Describing Lindsay Lohan or an American Idol as a "wunderkind" is a chic, pitch-perfect proclamation.
Another reason that puts these words in vogue, as it were, is that because of the combination of their nebulous connotations and distinctive auditory presence, they communicate more about the speaker and situation than the sentence they are used in, acting like verbal accessories that show off the utterer's personal style. People use big, complicated, words to look smart, and let's face it, no language has bigger, clunkier words than German. While French may have been the language of choice of 19th century gentlemen and women and the upwardly mobile suburbanites of 20th century (see "armoire," "foyer," and "chaises longes") the hip and literate of this cultural moment are turning to German to show off their good taste and flair for the exotic. These are often the same people who see themselves as outside mainstream America, so Deutsche zeitgeist is also the logical counter-culture reaction to being governed by a president who eschews international influence in favor of intense patriotism and folksy sayings. Embracing the foreign and highfalutin caustically mocks Bush's mispronunciations and what some see as his inauthentic embrace of "real" America.
Regardless of the thought (or lack thereof) that goes into using them, the upshot of it is that no one's going to start paying any more attention to using these words correctly—at least not until some angry linguist writes a vocabulary-based tirade in the spirit of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Nor are they likely to develop a collective English meaning, as their cultural connotations (cosmopolitan, esoteric, brainy, but in a sexy way) will come to completely overshadow what these words actually mean. Ironically, in this individualism-promoting cultural bubble, people have begun to customize their words to act the way they want them to, like songs on an iPod playlist—in which case schadenfreude is whatever you want it to be. Now if that's not zeitgeist, I don't know what is.