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by Koshkin 2328 days ago
I like German because it has own words for many things (including, for example, radio and television).
3 comments

French does, too... the Académie Française makes sure of that and slaps you on the wrist if you use loanwords. Germans are rather more laissez-faire about it, and recently are absorbing rather a lot of English. For example, the other day my mother told me that she was going to go "walken", which I guess is a brisk walk for exercise purposes.
One such loanword, Angela Merkel amusingly showed the world a couple years back, being “shitstorm”: https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/06/europe/angela-merkel-shitstor...

Though the word has a slightly different meaning auf Deutsch than it does in English:

> According to the venerable Duden dictionary of the German language, the word is defined as "a storm of outrage in an Internet communication medium that, in part, goes along with offensive utterances."

How would you define it in English? I'd guess (German is my first language, so words existing in both are always tricky) a) it's considered a lot more vulgar in English and b) is more general for a bad situation with s* flying around?
Correct on both points. Shit is a fairly strong expletive in English, so it’s not a word you’d generally roll out in polite conversation. And a shitstorm in English doesn’t have a specific context of something that happens online, it’s just any situation where a bunch of really bad stuff is happening all at once.
> radio

If you're thinking of "Rundfunk", it's a lot less common than "Radio".

Hörfunk however is quite common.
Boy, those Germans have a word for everything.