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I understand about 3 words of German and I found that video fascinating. Like Russians from 1970 touring a Western supermarket or something.
by mturmon 13y ago
I understand about 3 words of German and I found that video fascinating. Like Russians from 1970 touring a Western supermarket or something.
- rolux 13y agoYes, you got the essence of it. I understand more than 3 words of German, and the money quote, by Döpfner, appears at the 6 minute mark: "What I would hope... that we do not try now to play from now on the cliché of a super cool Silicon Valley guy [laughter]. Let's really keep some sort of decent German spiessertum." The term "Spiessertum", and the German "Spiessbürger", refer to people with a particularly narrow-minded mindset, determined by extreme conformism and opposition to change.
- mturmon 13y agoThat word is great. I notice Google translates Spiessbürger as "philistine," which gets the conformity aspect, but doesn't capture the resistance to change. In English, stick-in-the-mud ("spiess" means stick, but the etymology of Spiessbürger is older than this) or fuddy-duddy capture some of this part of the meaning. "Babbit" or "Babbitry" may be the closest English terms to capturing the whole meaning.