This selection here will be a random one, by no means of any kind of preferences, just a loose collection of words popping up in my mind. Some are words or expressions which are not very likely to come across in a course book, but are part of the German soul, as it happens with ‘Kehrwoche’ (just the Swabian soul). To decide with which word to start was not an easy one, but I thought it should be a word regarding many people studying a language.

1. Wahlheimat

The Duden (THE dictionary for  German) defines it as: Land, Ort, in dem sich jemand niedergelassen hat und sich zu Hause fühlt, ohne dort geboren oder aufgewachsen zu sein (country or place in which somebody has settled down and feels like at home without being born or raised there).

This is a very reserved description which does not capture the antagonism of the two words ‘Wahl’ and ‘Heimat’.  Wahl means simply choice, and Heimat, hometown or homeland, a complex concept in the German soul, is something which cannot be chosen. The movie ‘Die neue Heimat’ expresses this concept. Is a neue Heimat always a Wahlheimat? Definitively not. Many people have to leave their Heimat, but probably would prefer not to do so, often they have no other choice then to move on to another place. So who would really speak about ‘Wahlheimat’? Somebody who decides deliberately  to live in another place. Once there, according to this understanding this person must also perceive the new place as a Heimat, which is – at least to a certain amount – impossible, because no one will perceive a place where one was born and raised in the same way as a place where this experience is missing.

A similar situation happens with Goethe’s ‘Wahlverwandschaften‘ (Elective affinities). The English translation captures well the fact that the two men and two women involved in the novel feel respectively close to each other, but it does not catch the fact that all the difficulties in their relationship raise from the marriage between Eduard and Charlotte. In fact , the literal translation would be something like ‘kinship of choice’. ( It seems that in English it sounds really bad, therefore the translator might have chosen a more literary translation). Here again one can see the contradiction, because kinship is not a matter of choice, which seems to be confirmed by the fact that at the end, the two couples of lovers cannot find to each other (but also the way back for the two spouses is blocked).

2. Wahlpflichtfach

It translates something as compulsory optional subject. One should immediately object, how is it possible that something is compulsory and optional at the same time? Yes, it’s possible. At university, it happens pretty often that there is a an optional subject you must choose. Not yet convinced? Okay, it just means, you can choose whatever subject you like, or almost whatever you like, but you MUST choose. So the process of choosing is compulsory, but the subject isn’t. I like the fact that it is possible to express this concept with a relatively short word.

German is a very productive language. While reading newspapers, watching TV etc, every day you will find new words, compounds of other words, and we will all understand them.

Unfortunately, the German bureaucrats have also discovered a method of expressing a complicated concept in just one word, and they tend to overuse it (often called ‘Amtsdeutsch’ or ‘Juristendeutsch’), No worries about words like ‘Nummernschildbedruckungsmaschine’ (a machine to print plate numbers), or ‘Zahnzwischenraumreiniger’ (a small device for cleaning the space between your teeth). There are some Germans saying these words are pretty a horror for them, but maybe they don’t know how to use them. As it happens very often in German, we have the rule: more you get to the end, more it becomes important. For example, a ‘Zahnzwischenraumreiniger’ is something which cleans, basically a cleaner, but here it is not a person, but a device (or a cleaning liquid), and from here you just go back. What do you want to clean? The space (Raum). Which space? The space between (zwischen) your teeth (Zahn). But here we got another problem. In German, it is only one teeth (Zahn) and not ‘Zähne’, which would be the plural. Sometimes, I just think we are weird. How do we manage to have a space between only one item? I presume, what comes into play here is the German way of being just practical, so ‘Zähnezwischenraumreiniger’ would sound bad, not nice to pronounce, there would be one syllable too much. Maybe you will wonder, what hell does it matter another syllable in such a long word? Oh, it does. We also love music, and this syllable would offend our musical ear.

Then you get ‘Sonnenbrille’  (sun glasses) or ‘Sonnenschirm’ (parasol). Here, the singular-plural question is just reversed. ‘Sonnen’ is grammatically the plural of ‘Sonne’. But at least in our solar system, we got just one sun (and you know, usually we are very fuzzy about being exact). So how to explain that? ‘Sonnebrille’ wouldn’t  sound good. Why? It seems to me that there is no compound in German where the parts which are not the last ones end in ‘e’. The extra ‘n’ here does not have the meaning of plural, but just the function to make it easier to pronounce. Do we not get confused? No, we just don’t think about it anymore. Problem resolved. Try to make a test asking a German native speaker why we say SonneNbrille!

3. Kehrwoche

Being raised in Southern Germany this is a term I am very familiar with. When I moved to Hamburg after finishing high school, I discovered that this weird tradition was not shared by all Germans, even more, in the northern part of my home country it was either completely unknown or considered an outworn tradition followed just by crazy Swabian house wives. On the other hand, there,  in the northern part, I was confronted with what they called a ‘Feudel’ and in its verbal form ‘feudeln’, which I had never heard before, but was relatively easy to explain. It means to clean the floor with the ‘Feudel’ (mop) and water.

Coming finally back to the ‘Kehrwoche’ that is a more tricky one. Introduced in Stuttgart, the Swabian metropolis in 1492 (!), Kehrwoche is basically a plate which moves around a multi-family house from one family to another, reminding the latter that  it is his or her duty to clean the common parts of the building during the next week. In winter time with all its snow, this can become a tough task,  or even in autumn with all the fallen leaves.

It still makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable when I have to explain this tradition to any foreigner, so not Swabian, that this plate actually represents a more than 500 years old law. Stuttgart might be one of the cleanest German towns, but isn’t it not a bit exaggerated, wasted time to enact and enforce a law, just for the sake of some clean staircases and handrails? One might imagine how many quarrels between the residents can be triggered by subjects not respecting this holy law – Swabian house wives can have a very restricted view regarding this issue. So before you consider moving to Württemberg (the part of the Bundesland Baden-Württemberg where this rule governs) reflect about it very well, you might consider the more relaxed way of ‘feudeln’.

4. Word of the year (Wort des Jahres) and Unwort des Jahres

Before starting to say something about the topic, I am already confronted with the problem about how to translate ‘Unwort’. Usually, the prefix ‘un’- expresses the opposite meaning of a word, but what is the opposite of a word? Well, in German, ‘Unwort’ could have many meanings, so I am not sure if all native speakers would completely have the same idea about it. One dictionary says: the worst word of the year. Well, for sure, ‘Wort des Jahres’ does not mean the best word of the year.

In 1972, the ‘Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache’ (Society for the German language, an institution which supervises the development of the German language) has established the ‘Word of the year’. Germans love to institutionalize everything, even words. Every year, the word which, according to this society, had most  influenced the German society linguistically, would be published. The first chosen word was ‘aufmüpfig‘  (insubordinate, recalcitrant (!) – today we wouldn’t even think about it anymore, and in 2013 ( it is always published at the end of the year) we got ‘GroKo‘, the short form for ‘Große Koalition’, the coalition between the two biggest political parties CDU and SPD. These two parties were considered as politically very close by many people, so this meant not a big difference with having only one party governing (like the DDR was described as an ‘Einparteiensystem’, one-party-system). In fact, the opposition in the parliament had some trouble to act as an opposition. Some politicians were even contemplating how to give the opposition more power.

Although the ‘Wort des Jahres’ does not necessarily have a positive meaning (as in ‘GroKo’), in 1991 the German linguist Horst Dieter Schlosser coined the ‘Unwort des Jahres’, an action focusing on words or expressions which violate appropriateness of statements or humanity. The action started with ‘ausländerfrei‘ (foreigner-free) after the riots in Hoyerswerda against foreigners, where several died, and in 2013 ‘Sozialtourismus‘,  again xenophobic, meaning that people from certain countries, especially Eastern Europe, would immigrate to Germany in order to relax and have fun.

Other words were ‘Herdpräme‘ (stove prize) intending money the German government would give to families in which the mother doesn’t work and stays at home to look after the kids. Or ‘Humankapital‘ (human capital’) meaning that people are only an economic factor as many others.

As  ‘Wort des Jahres’, in 2010 we got ‘Wutbürger’ (angry citizens), referring to ‘Stuttgart 21’, a movement supported mainly by ‘normal’ citizens, many of them elderly, protesting against the upgrading of the main station of Stuttgart, because of the many related problems as exorbitant costs, unclear consequences for the environment etc.

Or in 2005, there was the short phrase  ‘Wir sind Papst’ (We are the Pope), only on the second place after ‘Bundeskanzlerin’. 2005 was an important year. After a long period of absence, we got a German pope and the first female Bundeskanzlerin (female chancellor). ‘Wir sind Papst’, is, of course, wrong in all its aspects: grammatically, as a matter of fact etc. But more interesting is the female form of Bundeskanzler, which is actually the reason for the ‘Wort des Jahres’ (and not her election itself, as somebody might presume). While for other job titles it is not only common practice, but an obligation to use the female form beside the male one, for ‘Bundeskanzler, before 2005, there was no need to do so. Even more, Ms. Merkel must be addressed as ‘Frau Bundeskanzlerin’. Linguistically, we got now new problems. What about  the Bundeskanzleramt. Do we now have a ‘Bundeskanzlerinamt’ (federal chancellery)? No, we don’t. So, the ‘Bundeskanzlerin’ works still in her ‘Bundeskanzleramt’. Not really consequent, very ‘undeutsch’, isn’t it?

Maybe in order to be consequent, in 2013 there were news that the university of Leipzig had introduced a new title, ‘Professorin‘ would be used for female AND male staff. The male professors had to be addressed as ‘Herr Professorin’ and the female ones as ‘Frau Professorin’. It seems that the message was too strong, so the university then had revised the statement, declaring that this rule applies only in the basic laws of the university where for job titles  just the female form would be used, but men could still use the male form. A little bit contradictory, but ….

P.S. When my German students ask me if  ‘man’ (one, you)  isn’t the same as Mann (where obviously it comes from),  sometimes I would like to introduce ‘frau’, which has been actually used by many female writers.

5. Weißwurstäquator und Röstigraben (Equator of the Bavarian veal sausage and ditch of fried grated potatoes)

Reflecting about Germany, most of the people won’t think at German food at first, because Germany is not known as a country of gourmets, and if you think about it, you will have pork knuckles in mind, or some hefty sausages. The dishes known by foreigners are exclusively from Southern Germany, and 95% of them from Bavaria. One might assume the reason for this is that the cuisine in the northern part is not good at all. I presume, the reason lies more in the fact that a huge part of the Bavarian population is very traditional, so their food has not changed for ages. In comparison, if one tries to find a restaurant with typical German dishes in Northern Germany, he will probably fail. You got a lot of Turkish, Italian, Greek, Chinese, whatever culture restaurant, but you will hardly find a German one – a part from the terrific fast food stalls.

And then Bavarians are just Bavarians  – and very proud of it. I remember, turning back from holidays in Austria, we had to pass the German-Austrian border (in these times still existing). Once arrived in Germany, you couldn’t find any sign telling you that you were in Germany, just a big one: Bayern. Somebody ignorant of the geography in those parts could have presumed that Bayern was just a country on its own, not a ‘Bundesland’ (federal state) of Germany. And here we go: Weißwurstäquator, the border between Bayern and not-Bayern (once prussians). The other German regions are also divided by cultural differences, dialects and so on, but the real distinction is the Weißwurstäquator.

Something similar happens in Switzerland: the ‘Röstigraben’ divides the German part of Switzerland from the French-speaking one. Rösti, a dish of fried grated potatoes, is considered the ‘traditional’ dish of the German-speaking part, Röstigraben stands for the differences how the two parts vote at referendums.

6. Ladenhüter (shelf warmer)

An item which takes care of the shop, because it stays there for a long time, actually a too long time. A nice euphemism which might be the ruin for the shopkeeper.