This Is Me
Things are difficult to define in single words, especially if just using bigger words to explain smaller ones.
But there are ways to break things down. Personally, I’m a fan of lists.
For example, this is me:
· Linguist
· German
· Ethnically Vietnamese
Each bullet point is neat and easy to swallow.
But without chewing, sometimes we take things in without knowing what they mean. Or they go down with a few assumptions.
You could expand points with a bunch of brackets.
· Ethnically Vietnamese (parents from Vietnam (emigrated to Germany in the 1980s (did not leave voluntarily)))
But that gets messy fast. Before you know it, you’ve gone from a human language to a programming one.
Instead, you could make lists inside each point.
- Ethnically Vietnamese
— — Parents emigrated to Germany in 1980's
— — — Refugees
— — — — “Vietnam” won, but no victory is complete without losers
- German
— Grew up in Munich
— — Capital of Bavaria
— — — Free state
— — — —Separatism, animosity towards Federal government common
— Identifies as European
— — Favours big ideas over small clubs
— — — Uncomfortable with British isolationism
But there’s so much wrapped up in each point, if you break down every single one, the list becomes a sprawling disaster.
Let’s try something else.
· Linguist
What does linguist mean?
Another way to understand things are stories. Examples; maybe not representative, but getting across a point. Like news stories.
Linguists do make the news: packs of them gather annually and choose the word of the year, which is great publicity. More interestingly, German linguists also choose the Unwort des Jahres, the un-word of the year.
A term that is dangerous to civil society, words that erode principles of democracy or human dignity.
Past examples include:
· collateral damage (1999)
· human capital (2004)
· and lying press (2014)
Unwort of 2016 was: Volksverräter.
Satisfying to pronounce, and eye-candy to language nerds because of the two Vs, two Rs and the Ä. But pretty faces can be deceiving.
Literally, it means traitor to the people. Last year, I read it in the British press, though not in the German media.
But linguistics goes beyond defining, it picks things apart.
Words gain their power through context. In this case, the realm of extremism. Treason to the people is, the committee says, an undifferentiated, unequivocal denial of the traitor’s
· Rights
· Opinions
· Personhood
If that sounds like exaggeration, remember that the murderer of MP Jo Cox introduced himself to the court as “death to traitors.”
But analogies can be misleading: analysis is the linguist’s tool, disassembling.
Verräter means traitor, Volk means people, and it is the latter that the committee took particular issue with.
Commonly, a people is understood as the population of a nation, but German nationhood is recent and fragile. The Federal Republic consists of sixteen devolved countries (think: four countries of the UK).
That’s only since 1990; there used to be two Germanies. The separation was ended to crowds chanting: Wir sind das Volk. We are the people.
That slogan is Germany’s rallying cry, putting the people above an immoral ruling class: first the aristocracy, then the monarchy, and eventually the ideologues of the Cold War.
So what’s wrong with Volk? Again: context. The movements that use the term now have a far more toxic tradition.
In fullness, Volksverräter was last used by the National Socialists. Normally it was followed by a death sentence, and dissenting voices were silenced by guillotine, in one famous case in the university I was once enrolled in.
Last year, it was shouted at elected representatives who supported:
· hosting of more refugees
· Willkommenskultur, a ‘welcome culture’ towards immigrants
· European integration
Forget the unifying spirit of the word Volk. In actual linguistics: Volk doesn’t mean the citizens of a nation; Bevölkerung does. What Volk means is one, homogeneous ethnic group. A tribe.
Seeing Germans as an ethnic group is troubling. It makes German a closed category that excludes not only immigrants, but all Germans who don’t fit some arbitrary definition.
Among those declared Volksverräter were Joachim Gauck and Angela Merkel, the President and the Federal Chancellor. The former represents the citizenry, the actual Volk. Merkel represents the Federal government, the Bund or alliance; the German nation. Above region, religion or background.
Calling her traitor to the people is an attack on the Republic itself. It reveals the desire for a closed-off island with no citizenship, only tribal membership. Where you’re not judged by law, accomplishments or character; only by your ancestry.
Was this better than a list? If picking an Unwort of the year is over-analyzing, breaking that down over several dozen lines definitely is. I know that life doesn’t need to be taken apart and put under a microscope.
But it can be. And I do. And maybe more than anything, that is me.
