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Did you know these English words are borrowed from German language

In a recent tweet criticising the media attacks on actor Shah Rukh Khan’s 23-year-old son, I decried the “ghoulish epicaricacy” that animated this all-out assault on the young man. My use of the word epicaricacy, meaning deriving pleasure from the misfortunes of others, sent many scurrying to the dictionary. Amusingly enough several objected that I need not have employed such an obscure English word when there was a perfectly adequate substitute available from German — schadenfreude, a word far more commonly used in English to describe the malicious satisfaction that some people gain from seeing others suffer.

This is true — schadenfreude is more often used than epicaricacy — and it points to the remarkable capacity of the English language to absorb infusions from elsewhere. Where a foreign language has a word that precisely connotes something, English is happy to embrace it. And a surprising number of these borrowed words come from German, a language more commonly associated with long, polysyllabic formulations that are usually considered hard to pronounce and harder to spell!

One of those sesquipedalian German words that has found a place in many people’s vocabulary is Weltanschauung, translated most simply as “worldview” but embracing a comprehensive personal philosophy or conception of the universe and of human life than the simple “worldview” suggests. A writer’s Weltanschauung is often the subject of literary scholars’ attention. These would not necessarily be the same scholars who would write learned theses on the Bildungsroman, an untranslatable term for a novel that details the psychological development of the principal character. (There are many novels like that — and where one English word couldn’t be found to describe them, German came in handy!)

Amongst German words I find myself using, a favourite in my college days was zeitgeist, a term coined by the German philosopher Hegel in the late 18th century to refer to the spirit of an age. Thus, one might say that “globalisation was the zeitgeist of the post-Cold War era”. The word embraces the overall trend of thought and feeling in a historical period.

More commonly used and, therefore, familiar to readers of English-language newspapers would be words like angst, ersatz, kitsch, hinterland, leitmotiv, realpolitik and wanderlust — words that are so common they are not even italicised in English and many don’t even realise they were borrowed from German. Kitsch describes cheap, often gaudy art or tourist trinkets, and is used with a sneer to refer to items purchased by people with poor taste. Some of those items might be ersatz, a German word meaning “replacement” that’s used in English to refer to a cheap, inferior substitute for something. (“That ersatz plastic statuette was such a piece of kitsch! Why did she buy it?”) Hinterland is the inland trade region or district behind a port and served by it, often bordering a coast or river and claimed by the state that owns the coast. Realpolitik, which may gradually be falling into disuse in English, refers to the practice of hard-nosed power politics to pursue a country’s national interests without heed to moral or ethical considerations. (It was first devised in German to describe the policies of the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck in the second half of the 19th century, and the term stuck.) Realpolitik was the leitmotiv of his foreign policy (leitmotiv being another German term, this time used in music, for a dominant and recurring theme).

Wanderlust animates many inveterate travellers — it’s a wonderful word for a deep-seated longing to travel, or an urge to go for long walks or hikes, or to impulsively head out without a planned destination, just to get away from it all. That’s how the Germans use it, and we do too. But angst is special, because its English usage actually goes beyond the German original. In German, I am told, angst describes fear of any kind, but in English it has acquired more profound connotations, denoting a combination of fear and anguish defined by one dictionary as “a gloomy, often neurotic feeling of generalised anxiety and depression”. I hope reading this column doesn’t generate any angst in purist users of the English language!

wknd@khaleejtimes.com