This week's word is a bit of a no-brainer, as are many culinary terms that have traveled with the food in question. But I wanted to end this year's blogging on a Christmasy note. 

Very often, foreign food simply keeps its name. To me, this is something different than other processes of word adoption. This is because people eating "exotic" food tend to be aware that they're eating something non-local. When they use a foreign non-food term, however, this is often not the case. 

In English (and probably lots of other languages), the sweet fruit cake known in German as Stollen and mostly eaten around Christmas time has thus simply kept its name.

Word of the Week will be back in January. Have a relaxed holiday!

The image is from whatscookingamerica.net.

This is the very first Word of the Week from Spanish - please let me know if you know of any others, since I completely depend on my readers for this language! Hinterland was pointed out to me by Marta in a comment related to one of my earlier posts. 

In Spanish, hinterland seems to be used the same way as the German original, Hinterland, and the English equivalent, which of course is originally German, too. The French use it, too. I'm not sure how a Spanish speaker would pronounce it, but my guess is that the "h" at the beginning is the point where the pronunciation of hinterland differs most between the two languages. 


The image is from www.slideplayer.es.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a singspiel is "a form of German light opera, typically with spoken dialogue, popular especially in the late 18th century." This is a good example of a German word (Singspiel) being used because there simply was no equivalent phenomenon in other cultures.

The image is from www.amazon.ca.

Those of you who are regular followers have probably noticed that there are a lot of technical terms in Russian that have German roots. Well, here's another one of them: кабель (kabel), which is exactly the same as the German Kabel (cable, wire). 

The image is from www.hyperseo.ru.

Most people probably know the term poltergeist from the eponymous 1980s US horror series, but it has been around in English for much longer. Poltern is "to make a racket" in German, and a Poltergeist is a ghost that makes loud noises and throws around furniture etc.

The image is from www.plus.google.com.

This week, let's take a look at one of the most well-known Germanisms in the English language: schadenfreude, commonly defined as "pleasure at the misfortune of others." This is the original German meaning. Apparently, the English language now even boasts an invented inversion of schadenfreude: freudenschade. It is supposed to mean "sorrow at another person's success" (see the English-language Wikipedia entry on schadenfreude.) This word hasn't made it back into the German vocabulary (and I suppose it never will, since it does not make much sense to a German speaker.)

The image is from www.cambridge.org.

I suppose I'm a hausfrau myself right now, what with my baby daughter only being eight weeks old. But I prefer the neutral English definition of hausfrau - a (German) housewife - to the more informal one, "a woman regarded as overly domesticated or efficient" (Oxford Dictionary). However, my impression is that the word is far more often used in a demeaning rather than a neutral way. Hausfrau is a term from US English, by the way. And I think you'd be surprised at the number of hausfrau-themed blogs out there on the Web, most of them trying to be at least a little ironic about the term.

The image is from glamoroushausfrau.blogspot.com.

This week's term is an interesting one. The German Zugzwang is originally a chess term. In this context, it describes a situation in which a player is obliged to make a move, but where any move will put him or her at a disadvantage. This is the way zugzwang is used in English. In Russian, цугцванг ("tsugtsvang") was originally used for chess only, too. Nowadays, however, it can also be used to describe hopeless real-life situations. In modern German, the term has largely lost the connotation of something unpleasant waiting ahead no matter what you do. It still means that one is obliged to do something (urgently), though, so the notion of compulsion is still there.

By the way, the text below today's image reads "Zugzwang occurs more often in real life than in chess." I think I agree.

The image is from www.prozaru.com.