Some word fun

Readers may have gathered that language and languages is one of my great interests and entertainments. In a recent email to me, Scottish blogger Neil Craig (who writes lots of letters to Scottish newspapers) said: “A very short letter in the Herald today. I am glad of this since I was somewhat scunnered that they hadn’t published anything of mine since Christmas”

I was delighted to see the word “scunnered”. I don’t know where I remember it from. Maybe my mother used it. Maybe my Scottish wife used it. It is not really translatable but it means something like disgusted, emptied-out or defeated. Neil was in fact being a little reserved in his use of the word. A more common construction would be “fair scunnered”. An Australian would probably say “really shat” under the same circumstances.

There are a lot of foreign words that are not really translatable into English—which is why English has adopted so many foreign words. Two German words that we have lost from English seem particularly useful to me: Reich and Volk. I discuss the meaning of Volk here. I sometimes use both words in my postings here (I am the only one who dares!) —where they are fairly likely to be understood. The reason why they are rarely used in English these days is probably that Hitler used both words a lot, and used them prominently (“Tausendjahr Reich”, “Volksgenossene” etc). So part of the reason why I use them is to “stir the possum”: I have been waiting for some Leftist to pounce on me and accuse me of being a Nazi for using them. But, sadly, nobody has given me that pleasure. So I have given up waiting and will outline here the crushing reply that I had ready:

On all the products exported from the old Communist East Germany, there was a “brand name”—which was “VEB”. And what does “VEB” stand for? It stands for “Volkseigene Betrieb”, which translates as “The People’s own Enterprise” (though that translation could be argued about too). So if Communist East Germany put the word “Volk” on everything it produced, how come it is a Nazi word? The truth, of course, is that it is an ordinary German word that was in common use for at least 2,000 years before the Nazis came along.

And as for “Reich”: For starters, the East German State Railway was known as the “Reichsbahn”.

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, April 5, 2006 at 08:24 PM in No particular place to go
Comments (1) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by A. Windaus on April 05, 2006, 08:40 PM | #

Oxford dictionary definition

Scunner: A strong dislike, e.g. “they took a scunner against the United States”

Also to ad to your list, the name Volkswagen is used all the time, though I have noticed it’s become trendy for people to shorten it to VW, pronounced “vee - dub”; but I think that’s mostly because people are lazy when it comes to using the full name of things.

Can anyone remember the word used to describe the excessive use of slang? It’s not coming to mind.

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