Language Follies 15 (What's it all about, Umlaut?)

What’s Umlaut All About?

                                             Häagen-Dazs

                                        

                                     

What’s with all the fake umlauts? Are they supposed to evoke a feeling of exoticism, culture, individuality, or what? 

I hate the falseness, the fatuity of those efforts. I will never have any truck with their propagators. I would happily see them in Hölle. 

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What is worse than a pedant?

Answer: a pretentious pedant.

My LFS (Least Favorite Scotsman) has been a regular commentator on Fox Network’s telecasts of the 2024 European Football Championship (The Euros, for short). The best way for me to inform you of why he is such an annoyance to me is to quote from a post by reader Cranston Bickle in The Guardian:

  

Every year I so look forward to these competitions until the day when it dawns on me that Fox has once more been given the task of broadcasting it. It’s an awful watch - normally in my animated state I should be shouting at the failed passes or lack of advancement by the England team, but I invariably end up shouting at the commentators for the awful pronouncing of player names, especially when for added spice they try and do it with the accent of the poor players homeland. It seems they’ve been given Rammstein CDs to learn German, pronouncing city names with the gusto of a Nazi prison guard in a bad 70s war movie. 

But the truly amazing thing about LFS, who chews delightedly on the Leipzigs and Gelsenkirchens of the world, is that like so many other British commentators he can’t seem to pronounce the “Copa” in Copa America correctly.

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Today’s “Plus Ça Change” Report (or Republicans on the Mountain)

Cartoon in The New Yorker in 1963:

Six decades or so later:

A Trump tweet 

An offering from Jon McNaughton (“My art reflects who I am and doesn’t use nuance or shades of grey to make my point.”)

Of course, the major league suck-up governor of South Dakota joined in:

January 21, 2021

PIERRE, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem on Thursday said she gave former president Donald Trump a $1,100 bust depicting the president on Mount Rushmore last year because she knew it was something he wanted to receive.

Not to be completely negative, I offer here the opportunity for Trump to be depicted on Mt. Rushmore with the four great presidents:

 

The Relevance of the Irrelevant (Take 2)

Last November I printed a blog post entitled “The Relevance of the Irrelevant.”* The main point of the post was that when someone introduces something into an argument or discussion that is off-topic, they are inadvertently revealing what is truly in their mind. 

That latest example of this comes to us from the state of Mississippi. The mayor of a town called Petal, Hal Marx, commenting on the death of George Floyd, contended that he “didn’t see anything unreasonable” about it. Apparently, pressing one’s knee on a man’s neck for almost nine minutes while one’s victim cries out that he can’t breathe is quite reasonable down south. Marx added that “if you can say you can’t breathe, you’re breathing.”** 

What we have here is an example of pedantry used as an attempt to segue into an irrelevant tangent. Yes, Mayor Marx is pedantically correct in that if you can speak, you’re alive and breathing. Except, of course, every English speaker understands the words “I can’t breathe” are not to be taken literally. They are a signal that something dangerous is happening. 

Why did the mayor go off on a tangent? The irrelevance tells us the truth about his mindset as proven by his subsequent words: “Most likely that man died of overdose or heart attack.” “That man,” George Floyd, a Black American, had to be a contributor to his own demise. He couldn’t just be a victim of (white) police brutality; he had to be a criminal of some sort—at the very least a druggie. 

If Hal Marx had not offered up the irrelevant pedantry, would we know him as a racist?

I wonder what Marx would say to Mr. Shakespeare, whose Hamlet says (in Act V, Scene 2) after he has been pricked by a poisoned rapier: “I am dead, Horatio.”   

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* https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-relevance-of-irrelevant.html

**  https://www.yahoo.com/news/t-breathe-breathing-mississippi-mayor-231418722.html