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Linguistic Blend

Linguistic Blend - Hi everyone! After a three- week vacation in my home country, I am glad to be back at my laptop and with that back to the locally applied settings. I had no idea how complicated it was going to be to temporarily switch over to European IP- criteria. As a result, I simply decided to spare myself the inconvenience of publishing just another "external" blog entry and instead save it up for when I would be back again. In this sense, welcome back to my blog!- Although I perfectly understand that the English language has by now infiltrated societies on a global scale, - after all, it is used in the majority of internationally overlapping so- called universal fields such as commerce, science, medicine, finances, politics, health, culture, education, etc. - I clearly disapprove of a rapidly growing trend these days. No matter really if I randomly tune in on some Austrian radio channel or watch a German show, documentation or movie on TV, it just appears to increasingly come in vogue to deliberately sprinkle a few English words in here and there. This clearly makes me wonder about its actual purpose, though. Is it because we Austrians and Germans plain and simply speaking still carry a massive inferior complex around with us due to historically sweeping shortcomings in the past? Do we perhaps as a direct consequence deem such pathetic language blends the justification for a serious image upgrading? I frankly doubt that the latter will ever be the case in whichever way shape or form for the simple reason that most language mixtures of that sort sound right- out retarded in the most literal sense. Two weeks ago, I was watching a talent show on one of multiple German TV channels which was well comparable to "America's Got Talent". Please, forgive me if it slipped my mind what that televised contest was precisely called, but what ultimately burnt into my mind was that linguistically crappy pidgin blend of "Das Battle". "DAS" means THE and is of neuter gender. For God's sake, if anglicized, why not stick with English altogether and call it "The Battle"? To any native speaker of German (Austrians and Swiss included) a language combination such as this one not only sounds completely off but is a full- blown violation to their ears, if you will. After all, the English word "performance" with no validly existing equivalent in the daily use of colloquial German is at least somewhat paired acceptably with the female definite article "DIE". However, in all that hopeless nightmare of linguistic atrocities, my instinctive sense of hostility is unmistakably to peak with off- the- charts creations like "gechillt" (my spell- checker is screaming!) or "getalkt" just to name a couple of examples. Let's only hope that some among the countless parrots are still willing to apply the correct Past Participle suffix "-ed" for the sake of keeping at least a handful of remnant English grammar rules intact. Hands down, what tops off linguistic confusion altogether in this regard is that usually thick German accent which by no means contributes to any embellishment considering the linguistic pairing in question but rather predictably to just more ridicule and perplexed perception. As a small reminder, "Dance Floor" and "Ballroom" are still, and what's more, exclusively English terms and therefore don't necessarily add to any lexical or syntactic, much less semantic clarification once thrown into German en passant. Being fully aware of my all too conservative roots, I just can't help thinking that such careless blends of German and English virtually cheapen both idioms in the long run. English is English and in fact presents itself rather different from German with respect to grammatical structure, phonetics and vocabulary. Moving to the States about 11 years ago, I would categorically forbid myself to allow any unwanted German outbursts from just seeping through and crossing over into English. I'll never forget that one petty incident at a shopping mall when exactly that specific scenario occurred most involuntarily making me cringe and so yanking me out of that exhausted because sleep- deprived state of mind in absolute shock and agony. I simply could not believe that I had just misstepped like that for in my opinion languages need to be strictly kept apart, bottom line. Today as I am basically doomed to having to listen to intentional and awkward German- English blends of all kinds, I find myself trapped in dismay all over again. I am not kidding when I say that I am actually suffering because at times I cannot seem to stop twitching, jolting and well, cringing in the light of more than obvious linguistic decay.            

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