{"id":1343,"date":"2008-05-27T13:05:16","date_gmt":"2008-05-27T18:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1343"},"modified":"2008-05-27T13:20:50","modified_gmt":"2008-05-27T18:20:50","slug":"understanding-the-german-languagestep-one-there-is-no-such-thing-as-the-word-is-too-big","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1343","title":{"rendered":"Understanding The German Language&#8230;Step One: There Is No Such Thing As The Word Is Too Big&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Okay&#8230;I&#8217;m going to Mexico Thursday and I should be paying more attention to my Spanish then German.&nbsp; But I&#8217;m reading <a href=\"http:\/\/tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com\/2008\/05\/26\/taking_the_adversary_seriously\/\">This Interesting Column by Rick Perlstein over at Talking Points Memo<\/a> , about the American right&#8217;s failure to grasp the changing world around them&#8230;\n<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The Germans have a word, <em>vergangenheitsbearbeitung<\/em>, or &quot;working through the past,&quot; to describe that nation&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><em>Vergangenheitsbearbeitung<\/em>.&nbsp; <em>Vergangenheitsbearbeitung<\/em>. &nbsp; <em>Vergangenheitsbearbeitung<\/em>.&nbsp; Christ almighty.&nbsp; Okay&#8230;I think I&#8217;ve figured something out about Germans.&nbsp; 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&#8230;they have their new word.&nbsp; <em>Vergangenheitsbearbeitung<\/em>.&nbsp; <em>Vergangenheitsbearbeitung<\/em>.&nbsp; I&#8217;m not sure I can make my mouth do that without pausing for breath.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;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.&nbsp; Radar.&nbsp; Laser.&nbsp; Scuba.&nbsp; CD-ROM.&nbsp; WTF.&nbsp; Okay&#8230;that last one isn&#8217;t a word&#8230;yet&#8230;&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Okay&#8230;I&#8217;m going to Mexico Thursday and I should be paying more attention to my Spanish then German.&nbsp; But I&#8217;m reading This Interesting Column by Rick Perlstein over at Talking Points Memo , about the American right&#8217;s failure to grasp the changing world around them&#8230; The Germans have a word, vergangenheitsbearbeitung, or &quot;working through the past,&quot; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[93,55],"class_list":["post-1343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-uncategorized","tag-germany","tag-this-and-that"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}