"It is considered fashionable to acknowledge these multi-cultural linguisms, as in so doing you are able to distance yourself from the reek of German chauvinism," according to German Radio's Burkhard Müller-Ullrich. So why the German penchant for taking on new, so obviously non-German words, when, in contrast, the French, for instance, show such resistance? It is a sensitive topic in Germany, where language purists are sometimes accused of being too closed to the outside world, a charge that most Germans, due to their 20th century-history, do not appreciate. Storm in a teacup etymology update#Other newcomers to the dictionary, described as the "door frame of the German language", which was founded in the late 19th century and now contains 140,000 words, are "crossdressing", "digital native", "social media", "flashmob", "e-book Reader", "app" and "Facebook'", which, unlike "Twitter" or the verb "twittern", has been waiting in the wings since the last update in 2009 ("we wanted to be sure that it would stick around," a Duden spokesman explained). This year Duden will even take in the verb "wellnessen". Another is "wellness", a generic term to describe the health-farm industry and all it offers (massage, ayurveda, etc). When English native speakers fail to understand it, Germans often scratch their heads in bewilderment, having been convinced it was a popular English word. The one most commonly-referred to is "Handy" for mobile phone. Some are given the same definition they have in English, while others, like shitstorm (which in English, until now, has merely referred to a messy and repulsive situation) have been tweaked by German users to fit their needs. In fact, shitstorm – which was voted Germany's anglicism of the year in 2011 – is typical of a growing number of English words that have entered the German language over the past few decades. The opposite (which has yet to enter Duden) is "candystorm", that to Germans has a close association with the US "candy bomber" planes which dropped sweets from the skies for children during the Soviet blockade of west Berlin in 1948 to 1949. The Guardian first caught her using it in June 2012 during a discussion in Berlin with David Cameron, when she referred to having faced a " shitschturm" (her pronunciation) over her dealings with crisis-ridden southern Europe.Ī German protestant bishop, who recently faced a shitstorm himself, has called it the "modern-day equivalent of a stoning". The fact that Angela Merkel thinks nothing of dropping the word into press conferences and round-table discussions, has no doubt help speed its way up the word queue. Other versions of this phrase include a tempest/storm in a glass of water and a storm in a wash-hand basin. Before then the equivalent was a storm in a creambowl, which dates from the 1670s. The expression a tempest in a teapot, meaning ‘a small event that has been exaggerated out of proportion’, dates from 1818, and is apparently the American English equivalent of the British English storm in a teacup. The French word temps (time, weather), comes from the same root, as does the Spanish word tiempo (time, weather), Italian word tempo (time, weather) and related words in other languages. The French word tempête (storm, tempest), and the English word tempest both come from the Old French tempeste (storm, tempest), from the Latin tempesta (storm, tempest), from tempestās (storm, tempest, weather, season) from tempus (time, weather), from the Proto-Indo-European *tempos (stretch). In French equivalents of the eye of the storm include l’oeil du cyclone (the eye of the cyclone), l’œil de la tempête (the eye of the storm) and le cœur de la tempête (the heart of the storm). If you are in the eye of the storm you are in the center or most intense part of a tumultuous situation, or literally in the calm region at the centre of a storm, hurricane, cyclone or typhoon.
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