The other day the following astonishing report was heard on the favorite radio station of all politically interested Germans: A foundation stone had been laid, namely for the Deutsche Bahn clock in Germany;
a pilot project will be started soon.
Well, you could have thought, with something like that, you just hear away, without having to turn on the translation program in your own head, it's just background noise.
But you have to take the trouble to take the message at its word, then you realize what nonsense it is.
How do you lay the foundation for a bar?
And what can pilots contribute to the success of a railway timetable?
A few days later it was said that Commerzbank was back in the black.
And you thought: If I were in the black, I would give the bank a warm welcome.
Speech stumbling blocks and thresholds of understanding
Yes, language criticism usually sounds a bit know-it-all, nagging, nerdy - and everything has only gotten worse since this criticism only focused on two topics. One topic is about trying to include women and as many sexual and ethnic minorities as possible when speaking and writing, which leads to the familiar speech stumbling blocks and delays in understanding, ugly colons or capital letters in the middle of the word. There was talk of a theater courtyard recently - and it actually took a few seconds to understand that this was a word without any additional meaning. But if you only ever threaten with the generic masculine as a linguistic-critical reaction and defiantly defend the semantic status quo, you are demonstrating that you don't consider it necessaryto describe new relationships with new terms.
The other topic is the people who are suspected to be below their own status, the people who speak migrant slang or street German and who, which probably comes from listening to hip-hop and watching TV shows, always smuggle new English words into the beautiful German language, use incomprehensible expressions to evade the supervision of teachers, parents and language guardians and thus play their part in the division of society into those who understand Babo and those who are denied it. Anyone who wants to prevent this smuggling overlooks the fact that the language has always been renewed in this way, from the bottom up, so to speak, and can even reserve a few good old German words at Manufactum. The whole youth and migrant slang is a hundred times more vivid than the dry one,Bureaucratic and mostly manifestly wrong pseudo-English, which makes every conference a single misunderstanding in upper management.
Language criticism without a love of language, without a passion for the more beautiful, more precise and fresher term, is pure nagging, it has no consequences - and that is precisely why it must itself be the subject of language criticism: Because lack of consequences is the worst that can be attested to in a sentence. And because it really has to be about a different kind of criticism, a criticism that asks how language reflects or veils, exalts or mocks its subject matter. Who says what, for what purpose and with what effect: That is the question that arises when you take the trouble to take television, radio and politics at their word for a change.