German words in English

A couple of days ago I was reading What We Can Know, the latest novel by Ian McEwan, when I came across the word zeitgeist, which, as you know, is a term I use quite often in my classes. Inevitably, I thought of Susana (not her real name), a friend of mine with whom I had been discussing that very word. At the time she was reluctant to believe that such a German-looking word was really used in English. After a brief explanation on my part she was ready to concede that it was an English word, but speculated that it might only be popular among language freaks... Bizarrely enough, the day after our conversation, she heard the word zeitgeist in a Spanish TV series and simply couldn't believe it.

I must confess I was surprised myself. The presence of zeitgest in English harkens back to 1835. So it is safe to say that it is well-established in the language. In Spanish, however, the term is still restricted to the elitist spheres of academia... or so I thought. Its appearance in a TV show might be a sign that the tide is turning. Who knows?

Anyway, zeitgeist is, by no means, the only loanword that English speakers have taken from German. Wunderkind, for instance, is a noun that you may stumble upon every once in a while. A wunderkind is, essentially, a child prodigy. This should surprise no one, since Wunder means "wonder" and Kind is, of course, the German word for "child". So, now you may wonder (pun intended) why an English speaker should feel the need to employ such a foreign word. Don't we already have the expression whizz kid, which means the exact same thing? The answer to that question is pretty obvious. We sometimes prefer loanwords because their impact on the listener or reader is different. Rendevouz and tryst have the same meaning but feel different. Consider the differences between lingerie and underwear, safari and journey, or aficionado and devotee.

Remember that, at the advanced level, the semantic content of an expression is only part of the full meaning it conveys. A sophisticated speaker is expected to think about the register of a word as well as its connotations and even its phonetic associations. Wunderkind happens to carry a certain sense of excitement and marvel that "whizz kid" just doesn't have. It is more dramatic and, let's face it, slightly literary. You can use it to refer to someone young (not necessarily a child) who excels spectacularly in areas such as chess, finance, music, literature or sports, but if you don't usually discuss young little geniuses you might not need to use the term.

Other German words that you may come across in English are:

• Doppelganger (from Doppelgänger:"a person who looks exactly like someone else")
• Delicatessen (literally "fine foods")
• Angst ("anxiety and insecurity" as in the collocation teenage angst)

One that I frequently use is flak. I know. It looks like a typo or a misprint, but it is an actual word and it is quite popular in the media even if it has a rather sinister origin.

Flak is an abbreviation of FLugAbwehrKanone (or FLiegerAbwehrKanonen), which means "air-defence cannon". These days it is mostly used to refer to heavy criticism directed at some public figure. You can say, for instance, that "the president took flak for her recent comments on immigration". If you don't feel comfortable with an expression that originated in WWII, just remember that the English alternative also happens to have militaristic overtones. Indeed, you can come under fire for doing or saying the wrong thing.

Is that it? Of course not.

In scholarly contexts you may come across a panoply of German words. Off the top of my head I can think of Weltanschauung ("worldview") and Ursprache ("ancestral language"). However, you don't need to be an intellectual to make use German vocabulary. In certain areas of the Unites States loanwords from Yiddish are quite common. Terms like schmuck ("unpleasant idiot") or shtick ("comic performance") don't feel foreign anymore while others (schlep, schmoe) will be easily understood in New York, but might raise eyebrows in Ireland or New Zealand. I know what you're thinking. Yiddish is not German. And you are right. It is not even a dialect of modern standard German. That said, it shares a lot of its vocabulary with German and has .

The great thing about the German influence in the English language is its pervasiveness. In the U.S. the German word for "health", Gesundheit, is sometimes said when someone sneezes. Wanderlust (not frequent in present day German) designates the "desire to travel". The English word foosball (futbolín in Spanish) is actually an adaptation of Fuβball, which is what Germans call "football". And I don't need to explain words like kindergarten, poltergeist, kitsch or Oktoberfest, right?

One German export that some people seem to overlook, though, is the prefix über-, which English speakers use as a glorified version of "super-". Its first use was rather academic and referred to the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch, the notorious Superman (or super person, to be more exact), but these days you can be übercool, for example, if you're too cool for school, or über-stylish if you're some kind of trendsetter. Similarly, something can be über-secret. It definitely sounds cooler than top secret, doesn't it? The prefix looks less intimidating when you realize it's the German equivalent of "over". By the way, the name of Uber, the famous transportation company, is precisely a version of this prefix. Understandably, the marketing department of the firm chose to dispense with the foreign-looking umlaut (¨). I can't blame them. The very word umlaut is German!

Anyway, my favorite German / Yiddish word in English is mensch. As I have mentioned above, it means "person" in modern German. In modern English, however, it keeps the other meaning it has in Yiddish. A mensch is "a person of integrity and honor". Isn't that a word we should use more often? Come on. Help me make it more popular. Go out there and mention mensch 😜