If memory serves me right, Caesar described the Germanii as a large, hardy,
ferocious people who inhabited the gloomy forests to the east of Gaul, wore
hardly any clothes and were perpetually on the move. Well, if he were able to
have a look around the seashores of Spain, Portugal or Italy today, he might
say exactly the same thing, although this time around the context would be
rather more peaceable. The descendents of those redoubtable forest-dwelling
savages are probably the world's number-one travelers today, still gripped by
an extraordinary wanderlust that sends them to the four corners of the earth
in apparent flight from the serious, orderly and slightly boring society they
have constructed for themselves in their geopolitical sandwich between the
Latins to the west and the Slavs to the east. The Germans have done a lot of
fighting and a lot of thinking about that sandwich over the centuries since
Caesar reported on them, and the words that have entered the English language
from their experience frequently reflect those military and intellectual
struggles: they are light on things like play, gastronomy, fashion and
frivolity but top heavy in philosophy, political thought and struggle in
general: serious, consequential stuff. If these words tend to be a little
ponderous and hard to pronounce, they are marvelously apt expressions of what
could never be expressed so well if our English tongue just minded its own
business and never wandered abroad to steal from others. -Rudolph
Chelminski (rudychelminski@compuserve.com)

(This week's Guest Wordsmith, Rudolph Chelminski, is an American freelance
writer living in France.)