"loose 22-year-old group of women within the club called the Haecksen (a pun on the German word for witch)." In case you're wondering, the German word for witc

"loose 22-year-old group of women within the club called the Haecksen (a pun on the German word for witch)." In case you're wondering, the German word for witch is Hexe so the name sounds like witches. It's interesting with all the language PC in the US (e.g. a lot of articles and books on hackers will use the pronoun she although women in this field, by everybody's admission, are rare) Germans are quite OK with the fact that the word for hacker is masculine. Indeed I think a lot of people would be surprised if there was a movement to change it to die Hacker. There's, of course, die Hackerin but a lot of people here would object to that even more, since it's derived from a "male" form of the word. Similar situation in French, although, as it predicated by their angst over their language, things are not so easy (http://www.nakedtranslations.com/en/2004/hacker http://www.nakedtranslations.com/en/2004/hacker). On a different note, this word for witch is why those weird signs are called "Hex Signs" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_sign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_sign).