For some strange reasons the Germans seem to be fond of the word ‘typo’. For example, the most popular German Content Management System is called ‘Typo3’ and there is another German CMS called ‘TypoLight’.
Maybe the Germans think in German when they use the word ‘typo’. In German it might convey the idea of ‘type’ rather thank making a typing error. However, in English the word ‘typo’ has only negative meanings (typing error, typosquatting, etc).[YSaerTTEW443543]
I don’t know any Germans who are fond of “typo”. There are many Germans who don’t even know the word. I personally don’t like it even though I’m “a German”. It sounds just as ugly as “Tempo”.
Maybe I should rephrase the question then: Why did the Germans call the only German CMS that has gained international popularity ‘Typo3’.[YSaerTTEW443543]
That’s not the only word Germans are in love with. They use the word “solution” too much. Everything in business is some kind of “solution”.
If they’re building a new plant in the US from scratch, they keep referring to “the greenfield project”, even though most Americans don’t know what they mean by “greenfield”. So the Germans keep using that expression for what Americans would just call “the new plant” or “the plant construction project”. The only thing I can imagine is that for the Germans it’s a big, exciting deal that they’re building something on bare land, whereas to Americans it’s routine.
Hi Jamie, how does the following Wikipedia definition of the term ‘greenfield’ sound to American ears: In many disciplines a greenfield is a project that lacks any constraints imposed by prior work. The analogy is to that of construction on greenfield land where there is no need to remodel or demolish an existing structure. Such projects are often coveted by engineers.[YSaerTTEW443543]
Okay, but it’s relatively rare in the US to hear people talking about a greenfield project, and most people wouldn’t be sure what it meant. And even if it’s used in the US by people in a few walks of life, the Germans use it to a very exaggerated extent, as if what the plant is being built on is more impressive to them than the plant itself.
IBM used to market the expression “business solutions”. There is an “HP solutions center.” Microsoft Dynamics offers an accounting business solution for your business. These are all American corporations. It seems to me that it is America who is on love with the word “solution”, especially the marketing executives.
A “Greenfield project” is a term coined by engineers, not by Germans. If Germans use it when referring to a “project that lacks any constraints imposed by prior work”, then why should there be anything wrong with it? If the Americans call it something different, then that’s up to them.
If it’s any indication, this dictionary (thefreedictionary.com/greenfield) that I’ve come to rely on over my years of studying English, has no mention of “greenfield” as “something being built from scratch”.
It lists it as “a piece of usually semirural property that is undeveloped except for agricultural use, especially one considered as a site for expanding urban development”.
I guess the idea Jamie tried to get across was that this specific meaning of “greenfield” is used by those in the know, and the general population of America is unaware of it.
English abounds in words peculiar to certain fields of science that are generally not used outside those fields. Using them liberally (e.g. outside their usual contexts) would perplex most people, even those in the know, and hinder communication. It pays to use simple words to make sure you’re coming across loud and clear.
There are some countries (not Germany), where some people’s English is constantly peppered with phrases from Beatle songs. The speaker himself my not have learned his English from listening to the Beatles, but his teacher or his teacher’s teacher probably did, and if the country used to be communist, that’s practically ALL he heard. You get very tired of hearing people constantly say, “Let it be!” instead of, “Never mind,” or, “Forget about it,” or, “It’s OK.” After that Beatle song stuck in the nation’s head, it blocked acquisition of all other phrases of that sort. That’s just one example. At first it’s comical, but when you live with it for a few years, it starts to get irritating.
Oh, good! I was starting to get worried about you!
There are popular words in every language. Some word or expression gets in vogue and it is being used over and over until it makes you want to scream! There are also words that really become a habit. For example, I hear many Americans say “Whatever” much too often. Certain groups make specific words their own, like “that’s totally phat!” and they say it all the time, for everything. Talk about annoying! Using an expression repeatedly and even habitually is not only a problem among non-native English speakers.
When a German engineer speaks to an American factory worker and the term “Greenfield project” is being brought up because the German engineer unknowingly thinks it is a regular word, the American factory worker would usually go, “What’s that?” After the German explained it, the American says, “Oh, wow! Learning never stops, does it?” This is how I know most Americans to be: open-minded, and quite impressed that a non-native speaker knows and masters his language so well.
So, if you get annoyed by the repeated use of an English word by a non-native English speaker, please remember that the rest of the world is being confronted with popular and corporate terminology, which is, of course, mostly in English, all the time, and we get words like “solutions” stuffed down our throats via advertisements and entertainment, whether we want them or not.
There is another issue that I run into in my ESL classes. The current generation of Americans finishing high school now has been shown to have an average vocabulary half the size of his counterpart in the 1960s or early 1970s. There are two results for me:
One is that my ESL students show their vocabulary books to American coworkers or classmates in their 20s or 30s and find out those people don’t know most of the words in the book. Then the ESL student will come back and start yelling about us teaching him words nobody knows and that he’ll never need. I just ask him if he wants to write in good English or stupid English. All the words in the book would have been familiar to me when I was 16 or 17, but the Americans the student works or studies with don’t know them.
The other is that translation companies or publishers in Europe unwittingly hire younger American editors with small vocabularies. These editors will often flag ordinary words in people’s translations as “unknown”, “nonexistent” or even not English. I’m not talking about strange words either, but words that most well-educated people would know. The funny part is that the editor will just tell me he doesn’t know what the word means, so he apparently hasn’t checked it in a dictionary. He probably doesn’t think it’s important to look up words he doesn’t know, which is another sign of a deteriorated American education.
What really puzzles me is why ESL students sometimes don’t bother looking words up! Here I see some ESL students who, when they encounter words they don’t know, ask questions along the lines of “what’s it mean?”. Like they haven’t heard of on-line dictionaries!
When I see a word I haven’t seen before, it always piques my curiosity and I look it up in a dictionary. Whether it’ll stick in my mind is a whole nother thing of course.
PS: when will Firefox’s spellchecker accept that “nother” is an English word! =))))
Usually the ESL students ask, “What means _____?” No matter how many times you correct them for how many years, they’ll still say, “What means _____?”
I’m one of the few ESL profs who want them to use a bilingual dictionary. Some instructors insist that they use English-to-English dictionaries, but studies have proven that they do better with bilingual dictionaries until they reach a very advanced level.
I’m actually glad when the students ask me the meaning of a word, because sometimes their dictionaries give the wrong impression. For example, people who look “embarrassed” up in an Arabic-English dictionary are liable to think that the word means the same thing as “shy”. Or else the dictionaries miss some kind of nuance that’s needed to distinguish the new word from another they know, and for them to understand it may require a much longer explanation.
And some of the cheaper electronic dictionaries from Eastern Europe often give them English words that are 1930s slang or have been obsolete from the 1800s. Or they may, on occasion, give them bizarro words that don’t and have never existed in English.
That’s a real problem. On the one hand, children are being put under so much stress and pressure to succeed, yet when they are being asked a question, they don’t know the simplest of things.
The youngsters just don’t understand the old folks anymore:
What does ‘too much’ mean in this context? Is there an agency in the US that determines how frequently a term can be used? Or are is it Jamie (K) who defines how many times an expression can be used per day? Also, how do we know that Jamie (K) is actually American? He might as well have been born in raised in any country.[YSaerTTEW443543]
No, we’re not Europe, so we don’t form agencies to control every little thing people do, and we don’t write up constitutions that dictate the correct size of tomatoes.
However, many Germans, especially German business writers, have adopted “solution” or “Lösung” and use it to replace all kinds of ordinary words that would be more accurate, such as “product”, “service”, and they often use the word to refer to things that don’t solve anything. Sometimes it’s not even clear what they mean by “solution”, and when it reaches the point where a word is used to mean virtually nothing, then it’s clear you’re using it too much.
