Mark Twain had a notoriously thorny relationship with German, a language he gamely tried to conquer. His main beef was with its knotty grammar: ‘Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.’ He cast a satirical eye over its vocabulary too: ‘These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions,’ he wrote of such linguistic whoppers as ‘Unabhängigkeitserklärungen’ (declarations of independence).
Many a German student would recognise Twain’s perplexed awe at a language that positively encourages Lego-like word-building (which would go something like ‘Bauklotzartigewortzusammensetzung’). They would also, however, as Twain himself surely did, relish a suppleness that allows for endless extension with such majestic results. Ben Schott, author and creator of the successful (and much ripped-off) Miscellany brand, has clearly seen the potential. His Schottenfreude is a homage to German’s capacity for word-confection.
His starting point is the gaps within our native language. English may be the fastest moving language in the world, but there are plenty of concepts, sensations and everyday occurrences which lack a pithy word to describe them. Take the clunkiness of ‘the day before yesterday’ and ‘the day after tomorrow’: German provides single words for both. But it is not real German words that Schott is concerned with. Rather, with the help of a German editor, he has minded the gaps and then made up a German word to fill them.
Others have gone there before him. John Lloyd and Douglas Adams’s The Meaning of Liff gave place-names to things we really should have had a word for in the first place, such as ‘HARPENDEN: the coda to a phone conversation, consisting of about eight exchanges, by which people try gracefully to get off the line’. More recently, Toujours Tingo, from Adam Jacot de Boinod, identified words from other languages that express in a single word what we struggle to do in ten (‘Tingo’ itself, from the language of Easter Island, is defined as ‘borrowing items from a friend’s house one by one until there is nothing left’).
Many of Schott’s creations are no less pleasing, and will strike a chord in most of us. ‘Deppenfahrerbeäugung’ is ‘the urge to turn and glare at a bad driver you’ve just overtaken’, while ‘Traumneustartversuch’ conveys ‘the (usually futile) attempt to return to the plot of a dream after having been woken’. We’ve all experienced ‘Speichelgleichmut’, ‘pretending that you haven’t accidentally been spat at in conversation’ and deftly translated as ‘saliva stoicism’.
Schott’s lexicon of such words is only half the story. His inventions are platforms for the real purpose of this, as for all of his miscellanies, namely the collection of random nuggets of information that readers can glide or linger over as they wish. We can pick and choose, for example, from his personal list of typical ‘Gesprächsgemetzel’ (‘moments when, for no good reason, a conversation suddenly goes awry’). They include the times when ‘you mistake a paunch for a pregnancy’, when ‘both of your neighbours turn, leaving you to stare at your plate’, or when ‘a lull in ambient noise exposes you as shouting’.
Other observations are more earnest, taking their wisdom from philosophers and poets. ‘Zwillingsmoral’, reading horoscopes you don’t believe in, is accompanied by thoughts on the matter from Theodor Adorno who once likened astrologers’ ‘feeding on paranoid dispositions’ to Hitler’s rise to power. Elsewhere, Schott’s musings encompass the anatomy of laughter, the vocabulary of queuing, and that gnawing sense of incompleteness when you know you have eaten only half a snack but can’t locate the rest of it.
In all of these it is the sentiments that we recognise. The German terms Schott creates for them, clever as they often are, are more or less incidental. No one is going to remember the word ‘Überrraschungspartyüberraschungsheuchelei’ (feigning surprise at a surprise party, literally ‘surprise party surprise hypocrisy’), especially when written in the old German Fraktur script, a clunky choice by the publisher, reminiscent of kitsch pub signs, beer ads and early Nazi propaganda. But they will surely recognise the sentiment of the word, and appreciate a psychiatrist’s observation that fake surprise tends to be faked for far too long.
One of the words in this collection is ‘Witzbeharrsamkeit’, defined as ‘unashamedly repeating a bon mot until it is properly heard by everyone present’, something Barack Obama is apparently guilty of. One might equally accuse Ben Schott of a similar exercise with his own brand; proliferation is a risky thing. Yet though the pleasures that his books offer are fleeting, they are pleasures nonetheless. Schottenfreude may be a slight book, but if it brings the peculiar delights of German to its author’s numerous fans, it would be churlish to complain, even for Mark Twain.
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