This curious anglicism is an abridgement of the English term pump-action rifle. The handgrip of this type of rifle (or shotgun) can be slid back and forth in order to eject and chamber a round of ammunition, an action that is faster than either bolt-action or lever-action reloading. Die Pumpgun is capitalized, joined and given female gender and is inflected with -s- in the genitive.
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Pumpgun, die
Lounge, die
With just two omnibus Anglicisms, das Center and die Lounge, one could in theory describe the entirety of urban life. Every activity where your mien is earnest - government, religion, education and commerce - may take place in a building styled das Center. But if the management desires that you smile, the business space will be dubbed die Lounge. The genesis of the lounge, as a more comfortable type of living room in a home than an old-fashioned parlour or best room, is no longer visible in German. However two compound derivatives, the lounge bar and the hotel lounge, clearly entered German decades ago and were abridged into a single term, die Lounge. That is as far as the execrable Duden Fremdwörterbuch gets with its out-of-date definition: "Gesellschaftsraum in Hotels o. Ä; Hotelhalle / Cocktailbar mit anheimelnder Atmosphäre." Die Lounge today is just as likely to mean a status or a part of a website as a physical space. Examples include:
Die Lounge is capitalized, given feminine gender, inflected with -S- in the genitive and pronounced with a less complex diphong than in English.
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pink
Pink never refers in German to the plain pink colour denoted by the word in English, but is an abridgement of the English term shocking pink. The English word pink was probably inspired by the delicate pale reds of a flower, Dianthus gratianopolitanus, known in English as pinks and in German as the sommerblühenden Nelken. It is no accident that the German word for the same colour, rosa, is also derived from the observation and cultivation of garden flowers, in this case the rose. The most remarkable episode in the fashion history of pink/rosa was the fascination for decades with pink or "rosy" skin, particularly on the cheeks, and the sale of powders to achieve this effect. When I was young, stage make-up employed the reddest of such powders, rouge, to suggest an elderly lady still stuck in the fashion excesses of her youth, and I can remember a few granddames still left at the time who made up their faces this way. However this implication would probably be lost on audiences today. Shocking pink is a 20th-century invention, and may at some point in the future be used as a figure for a similar out-of-date fashion sense. Pink, which is a false friend, is inflected as a normal German adjective. ... Read More
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