weird words

English as Lingua Franca on the Net - BBC magazine.

Response (and a closer discussion of Pidgins and Creoles) at the Economist with the most wonderful headline Im in ur internets, creolizin ur english though the text will tell you that in fact this is not happening.

We might be simplifying grammar and introducing new terms - I'm waiting for the Denglish Beamer for video projector to make its way into international conference talk and thus into English.

Another Year in Words list over at Collins dictionaries which starts with broga (new to me) and ends with fiscal cliff.

And now a link that is not only interesting for the story it reports (Not clearly enunciating means you could lose lots of money on a game show), but also because it uses a variation of the term grammar Nazi - pronunciation Nazi. I try to avoid making up new Nazi varieties as I think it's rather inappropriate.

Have you ever wondered about Uncle Sam as the embodiment of the United States?
It's 200 years old today - which I know thanks to another Wordroutes column.

It's Sunday again!

It's time for language linking!

I'm bringing a new - to me - word again and this time it's chiefly Australian:

ranga as the Australian version of British ginger meaning red-haired (which I believe has recently made it to the US through its use in Harry Potter and so on, as discussed on Separated by a Common Language here.)

Found at fully (sic) an Australian language blog, who got it from the Australian National Dictionary Centre's Word of the Month series.

If I manage to do it twice in a row, does it become a tradition?

Again a link to LanguageLog which this week gave us two vintage postcards and the commenters breaking the code used by the original writers.

There are also the Word of the Year lists going around - with Separated by a Common Language looking for words migrating between British English and American English. Leave your nominations over there.

I've also decided that there needs to be an International English Word of the Year and it has to be YOLO, because my students keep using it, not only in English lessons, but also thrown into German conversations. I'm convinced the trend will be short-lived - they will soon be embarrassed about writing it on their knuckles and all over their books, but its spread has been spectacular. In his Word column in the Boston Globe from August Ben Zimmer explains it to those over 25 (who don't get into regular contact with teenagers, I should add).

When I bring chocolate to school, I share it with my colleagues. I also might share the latest gossip.

Whereas I can use the same word in English, in a German sentence I'd probably use teilen or verteilen in the first example and "verbreiten" or "mitteilen" in the second. - My first theory was that teilen is only for physical objects that are divided among a group of people, but we also use teilen with joy or pain - Geteiltes Leid ist halbes Leid. The important factor seems to be that you divide something and then re-distribute it - hence we use teilen when we talk about numbers too: Was ist 4 geteilt durch 2?".

There is a shift going on though, because teilen is increasingly being used in contexts where I wouldn't expect the word. Social media, and especially facebook, is behind this, I think, because this is where we do our sharing of stories and pictures and suddenly there is "das meistgeteilte Photo auf twitter" which sounds rather odd, because no, the picture is still intact, it wasn't cut up in lots of tiny bits.

I wonder whether I'm alone in my feeling that this use is unusual, (I don't think so) and whether it is only older people who share my opinion (here we use teilen, too!) or whether the line is along frequent users of German social media and those who stay clear of it.

Edited to add some ideas that came to me after a twitter conversation about the same issue:

German can use prefixes to make teilen more specific: I'll say verteilen or austeilen when I hand out copies of a text or picture or poster. Mitteilen is used for (verbal) sharing of news or stories.

But it looks to me like we just don't do much sharing in German - when we share ideas, we say austauschen which is closer to the meaning of exchange - I give something to you and you give something to me. "Thanks for sharing" is difficult to translate - if it's just a helpful hint you've received you might say Danke für die Mitteilung, but if someone has just told you an amazing and touching story or showed you beautiful holiday snaps? I don't know what I'd say. Maybe thank them for telling me the story or express my gratitude for showing the pictures, but I wouldn't expect the verb teilen.

But as I said, it's starting to change, as a result of a direct translation of share in the contexts of social media.

Translating idioms can get you into trouble...

Like when as a German journalist you use the neutral "Patchwork-Familie" to describe a famous actor's two kids by two different women. He might feel it's disparaging and then your interview with him is cut short.
Personally, I think it's a wonderful way to acknowledge that many families today resemble a quilt because families join up and become larger when mums and dads separate and find new partners. Ohrwurm (earworm) made its way into English, so why not patchwork family, too?
(Germans call small children "dwarves" and that's meant in a completely nice way and does not mean that we think that they look like tiny old men with long beards. Don't take that up; it's not actually cute.)

Written because families can distract you from doing school work.