Okay…I’m going to Mexico Thursday and I should be paying more attention to my Spanish then German.  But I’m reading This Interesting Column by Rick Perlstein over at Talking Points Memo , about the American right’s failure to grasp the changing world around them…

The Germans have a word, vergangenheitsbearbeitung, or "working through the past," to describe that nation’s attempt to achieve something that, while not nearly as world-historic, dramatic, or portentous, is structurally similar to what has been happening on the American left over the last decade or so, apparently without many conservatives noticing: doing the hard work of reckoning with collective errs, facing up to them, unflinchingly staring them down, and restoring a community to balance by transcending them as best as we mortal humans can.

Vergangenheitsbearbeitung.  Vergangenheitsbearbeitung.   Vergangenheitsbearbeitung.  Christ almighty.  Okay…I think I’ve figured something out about Germans.  When they want a new word, they take the definition of that word, remove all the spaces between the words in the definition, and presto…they have their new word.  Vergangenheitsbearbeitung.  Vergangenheitsbearbeitung.  I’m not sure I can make my mouth do that without pausing for breath.

That’s as opposed to us terse Americans, who simply take the first letter of each word in the definition and make a word out of that.  Radar.  Laser.  Scuba.  CD-ROM.  WTF.  Okay…that last one isn’t a word…yet…