New roadsign -- Caution: Guests at Work!

The English language has suffered tremendous abuse in the past two or three decades.

Not through the wider use of swear words, not through texting and the accompanying LOLs 4 U.

The suffering has been inflicted largely by activists, politicians, lawyers, and the righteous brandishing their transvaginal ultrasound wands like really bad caricatures of the wands in a Harry Potter movie.

Linguists have been somewhat tongue-tied in a very literal rope and pin sort of way in the face of the phenomenon we at the K-Landnews named "enhanced semantics". Between tied tongues and twisted knickers it is understandable that little attention was paid to similar changes in other languages.

Germany has seen its share of enhanced semantics. for instance, in the sweeping social security changes of a decade ago, long term unemployed sign a "re-integration pledge" upon applying for benefits. The pledge is a sort of contract laying out specific tasks and milestones towards that great new job.

You can refuse to sign the pledge!

No punishment!

The tasks and milestones of the unsigned pledge then morph into an administrative act, which means you have to comply anyway. And you get punished if you fail to comply.

Why does this sort of official behavior remind the blogster of Tony Soprano?

Enhanced semantics work their miracles not only with "Eingliederungvereinbarung", as the re-integration pledge is called in German.

Germany redefined the word "guest" some 50 plus years ago when it brought millions of guest workers into the booming country.
Gone were the days when being a guest meant zero work on your part, meant being waited on by the hosts. The only exception to the good old times were movies showing the gate of dark fortress opening as if by magic with a deep rumbling voice beckoning "be my guests", followed by a "ha ha" so even the dimmest of wit would understand.

The guest workers were put to work.


All in the name of avoiding the most dreaded word in German politics: immigrants.

Today, half a century later, with a population that has more first generation immigrants than the United States, the big political parties still do not use the "i" word, calling everybody migrants instead.

Migrants, with its reassuring air of "they will eventually move on" is in the name of the new federal office of "Migrant affairs", and only academics and some newspapers use "immigrants".
There even was a recent study by German think-tank Bertelsmann coming to the 50-year old obvious conclusion "Germany is an immigrant nation".

I so wish someone would pay me a hundred grand for voicing such wisdom.

And the Germans never changed their construction sign!

Okay, they didn't have to because they were far sighted and never had any text on it like "Caution - Men at work!". Instead, their sign showed a stylized male with a fedora and a shovel.