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:

 

Ciao

Are you looking to buy a car? Well, there’s the FIAT 500, newly introduced to the States. FIAT had been absent from these shores for almost forty years (quality control, anybody?); indeed, Italian cars in general have been conspicuous by their absence—except for a handful of Ferraris for a few megabuck people and a Maserati for Johnny Sack on The Sopranos (forget about Alfas and Lancias).

But back to the FIAT 500: it’s a car so small that you could park it in your linen closet, with enough spare room for a few sheets and a bed sham. (And that sham probably has more horsepower.) Nevertheless, assuming you do want a 500, don’t go running down to your local car dealer begging for one--because, according to the FIAT ads in the New Yorker (where one would have expected instead to see glossy layouts for the latest Mercedes and BMWs), the little Tinker Toy car is “available at a FIAT Studio.”

Looking for further information about the car, I clicked onto the website for Autoweek magazine. Members of the staff had driven around in the 500 and the one thing they all seemed to agree on is that it’s “cute.”

Pretentiousness is bad enough—but pretentiousness and cuteness? That’s barfable.