American hedonism closes its eyes to death, and has been
incapable of exorcising the destructive power of the moment
with a wisdom like that of the Epicureans of antiquity.

- Octavio Paz
Death is un-American, and an affront to every citizen's inalienable
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

- Arnold Toynbee
the_band_huge
the_band_huge
"As long as such self-serving hypocrisy
motivates America's response, Ukraine will
only sink further into needless bloodshed,
and that blood will be on America's head."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
the_band_huge
In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors,
since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors,
for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal
applies only upwards, not downwards.

― Bertrand Russell
Global Coke
Global Coke
"What those 'racists' are reflexively and rightly reacting
to is the soulless chill as the fire goes out beneath the
melting pot. Those who think America can thrive as a
'cultural mosaic' are worse than fools; they're Canadians."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
Global Coke
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe.
It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster,
in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe
have grown to appalling dimensions.

― Frantz Fanon
What the United States does best is understand itself.
What it does worst is understand others.

- Carlos Fuentes
Poor Mexico, so far from God
and so close to the United States.

- Porfirio Diaz
the_band_huge
the_band_huge
"Indeed, everything about the American southland was magical
and exotic to the young Canadian musicians, from the sights
and smells to the drawling manner of speech to, especially, the
central role that music played in people’s everyday lives."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
the_band_huge
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
- Sigmund Freud
America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.
- Auguste Bartholdi
chimerica
chimerica
"This is the tone of the China Century, a subtle
mix of Nazi/Soviet bravado and 'oriental'
cunning -- easily misunderstood, and
never
heard before, in a real enemy, by the West."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
chimerica
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
"And for the others who argued for English-only
patriotism, I note that there are more than
57 million Americans (about 20% of the nation)
whose first-language is not English...."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
predator-firing-missile4
predator-firing-missile4
"This is the behavior, and the fate, of paranoid
old-world tyrants like Hitler or Saddam, not liberal new-world democracies like America pretends to be."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
predator-firing-missile4
America is the only nation in history which
miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to
degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

- Georges Clemenceau
I found there a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce.
- Charles–Maurice Talleyrand
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle,
and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

- Edmund Burke
America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.
- Marshall McLuhan
"The removal of racist sports nicknames (and mascots) seems outrageously belated
-- why, exactly, has this civil rights cause
taken so long to gain momentum?"

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the
United States reactionaries use to scare people.
It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't.

- Mao Tse-tung
They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but
they kept only one; they promised to take our land, and they did.

- Red Cloud
In America sex is an obsession,
in other parts of the world it is a fact.

- Marlene Dietrich
I would rather have a nod from an American,
than a snuff-box from an emperor.

- Lord Byron
One day the United States discovered it was an empire.
But it didn’t know what an empire was.
It thought that an empire was merely the biggest of all corporations.

- Roberto Calasso
Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather
be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

- Alexis de Tocqueville
newtown
newtown
"No one, I thought, could watch those scenes, of young children slaughtered en masse, and so many parents grieving, without thinking that this, finally, would tip some kind of balance in the country."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
newtown
If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams
then you must still regard America today with the same naive
enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.

- Jean Baudrillard
I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.
- Samuel Johnson
America, thou half brother of the world;
With something good and bad of every land.

- Philip Bailey
"What can be more powerful than disinformation in the Information Age?"
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
- Sir Walter Besant
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by
posterity because he was the last to discover America.

- James Joyce
Now, from America, empty indifferent things
are pouring across, sham things, dummy life.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
If the United States is to recover fortitude and lucidity,
it must recover itself, and to recover itself it must
recover the "others"- the outcasts of the Western world.
- Octavio Paz
The youth of America is their oldest tradition.
It has been going on now for three hundred years.

- Oscar Wilde
"America really is, for most Americans, all things considered, a good place to be, and all they really want is for everyone to enjoy the same privilege and pleasure."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
When good Americans die they go to Paris;
when bad Americans die they go to America.

- Oscar Wilde
jobs drug dealer
jobs drug dealer
They're nothing more than traffickers; and as the smart traffickers'll tell you, you don't use the merchandise. They are just inoculating their kids with a tech-drug serum, to immunize them against the very merchandise that put the **** bowling alley in their basement.
jobs drug dealer
America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that
lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.

- Georg Friedrich Hegel
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room.
Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.

- Arnold Toynbee
Americans always try to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.
- Winston Churchill
The thing that impresses me most about Americans
is the way parents obey their children.

- Edward, Duke of Windsor
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering
what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

- John Maynard Keynes
Europe was created by history.
America was created by philosophy.

- Margaret Thatcher
America is God's crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of
Europe are melting and reforming!... The real American has not yet arrived.
He is only in the crucible, I tell you - he will be the fusion of all races.

- Israel Zangwill
American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those
who have seen America only in their dreams.

- Pico Iyer
America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
- Ringo Starr
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
It has never yet melted.

― D.H. Lawrence
I have two conflicting visions of America.
One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.

― Bono
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror
of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis,
the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.

― Roberto Bolaño

October 15, 2024

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Author Topic: "Denglisch is for losers, it has to stop"


Geoff-
Hamilton
Administrator
Posts: 172
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"Denglisch is for losers, it has to stop"
on: January 13, 2014, 18:08

from The Local: Germany's News in English

For years the German language has been overwhelmed with a flood of unnecessary and ugly English words and expressions – an advert for yoghurt talks about getting that weekend feeling a television channel runs a Kiddie Contest.
Us Germans do power walking wear outdoor jackets and beach wear, while putting on anti-ageing cream and style our hair.
Deutsche Bahn is perhaps the worst of all offenders with its tickets, service point and McClean.
Some people find it cool but others – the majority of Germans – are annoyed about the superfluous use of English junk and see it as showing contempt for their language.
It is absurd and undignified to replace German words such as Leibwächter, Karte and Fahrrad with bodyguard, card and bike.
This Anglicization of the German language has been accompanied with the global expansion of the American way of life, behind which stands the economic and political power of the USA.

http://www.thelocal.de/20140107/denglisch-ist-for-losers-german



Aminah-
Hayek
Experienced Their American
Posts: 17
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Re: "Denglisch is for losers, it has to stop"
on: January 15, 2014, 12:28

Distinctly doomed-looking rearguard action, I think. On the whole, I would say Brian Jones has it right in his 'America is dead! Long live America!' post: until Deutschland, Dominica or Djibouti have a powerful enough internal current to resist the wave of "sham things, dummy life", "pouring across from America" (Rainer Maria Rilke, in 1908), such protest is, in the author's words, "absurd and undignified".



Jason B
New Member
Posts: 2
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Re: "Denglisch is for losers, it has to stop"
on: January 20, 2014, 11:47

Here in Slovenia, my wife and I watch a fair amount of German television... and laugh ourselves silly at the advertisements. Slovenians are also wild about importing English words, but - wie soll ich das milde ausdrücken...? - the words are less often used as a linguistic fetish. A "Karte" does not morph into a "card" as often; when I listen to young people on the bus, as they slip into English, it's not pretty, but many of their phrases fill a lexical gap.
Years ago, I read the absurd claim in Die Zeit that somebody had lost a "Freund," because the "Freund" had become a "Friend." Sounds great, but we all know that the word "friend" in English - if you say that someone is your "acquaintance" in English, you're basically writing him off.
The Slovenians, meanwhile, have invented a half-word between "znanec" (acquaintance) and the very serious "prijatelj" (bosom buddy/freind): "frend," "frendica" in the feminine.
The budding linguist in me would like know whether anything similar exists in other European languages - that is, does anyone else exploit this space between the fleeting acquaintance and the bosom buddy?



AnyaH-vdL
Novice Their American
Posts: 8
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Re: "Denglisch is for losers, it has to stop"
on: January 20, 2014, 14:34

I have a somewhat ambivalent opinion on this, as Denglish is more and more often the language I communicate in with my bilingual friends and colleagues. There are just some things which I don't have the terminology for in one language or the other, so I start a sentence in one language and insert the terminology in the other. However, what seems to be at stake here, I think, is not Denglish (in the sense of a mixture between German and English used more frequently by bilinguals and a generation of young people who learn English from kindergarten onwards - this seems a normal linguistic development) but the mostly useless and unnecessary use of English words in advertising to make products sound 'more exciting'.
What I also find irritating is the coining of words that sound English but are in fact not understood in anglophone countries (i.e. "Handy" for mobile/cell phone or "Beamer" for data projector - it's not as if there weren't perfectly useable German words available: Mobiltelefon or Datenprojektor, but these aren't used by the majority of German speakers). These neologisms don't come from the outside. They may reflect a trend to value English over German, but they are still a product of German culture. That is why I would also agree with Aminah-Hayek's opinion above that this kind of development can only be counterbalanced by a powerful internal current, as for example in France, where English neologisms are radically suppressed in order to 'save' the French language. As this kind of development is usually associated with a certain sense of pride in one's national language and national heritage I doubt whether it is something that will happen in Germany anytime soon. For historical reasons, this kind of radical nationalist project is still frowned upon in Germany and I doubt whether there will be a shift in how we value German and English in Germany in the near future.



jacyfuller-
ton
Novice Their American
Posts: 5
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Re: "Denglisch is for losers, it has to stop"
on: December 4, 2014, 15:07

I will agree that the American culture has taken over the world in many ways. Even in Canadian culture, Americans have to push their way in, flooding our television programs with American references, & getting Canadian actors to portray Americans & then bash their culture because they are "supposed to be Americans in the program", so who cares about the insensitivity of it all, right? However, by pushing for the American culture it takes away from the expression of other cultures, making them feel oppressed. If America is going to look like a multicultural country that accepts all cultures & ethnic groups, it first has to allow those other cultures to thrive without forcing the "All-American White Dream" onto everyone else.



Patzker
New Member
Posts: 2
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Re: "Denglisch is for losers, it has to stop"
on: March 25, 2017, 08:49

I also find the overuse of the English or the American language in my country annoying. Not just the expressions that have crept into our lives and are taking over our own, but just the use of English when people are talking with each other. I have no problem if someone is conversing in a foreign language, but just to point out some phrase or use a word that is apparently non-existent in our own (which is of course not the case!) when you are talking with another in your native tongue is in my opinion just lazy and showy.
In my opinion, it shows the lack of self-esteem and pride of one's own roots and identity. In a world where America rules and is perceived as cool with their movies, TV shows and celebrity-I-don't-have-to-do-anything-important-to-be-famous attitude, it is hard to maintain a level of self-importance if it is not something you discuss or are being taught.



pijademsar
New Member
Posts: 2
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Re: "Denglisch is for losers, it has to stop"
on: May 31, 2017, 15:44

I have to admit I'm guilty of using English a lot but it also depends a lot on who I'm talking to. It may sound odd but with my girlfriend, for example, I talk in English as much, if not more often than in our mother tongue. The same goes for a few friends. Sometimes I'm simply more comfortable with using English, especially when it comes to discussing books, movies or series that are not available in my language since there is often some terminology that would just sound weird if we tried to translate it and since I'm not too fond of mixing languages, I often switch to English altogether.
I was actually yelled at by a random lady on the street once for talking to a friend in English because she figured out that we were not foreigners. She said we should be ashamed and that we have no business talking in languages other than our own because we're ''killing'' our own language and culture this way. I have to say I found this incredibly rude, and not just because of her tone. After all, it's not like we abandoned our own language completely; we simply use whatever is more convenient at the moment.

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