A post on Language Log invites comment on whether German has a friendly word for mess. Which brings us to the huge inroads in the last few years of der Messie, a term which has an almost loveable ring to it in the German language.The success of the book Messie No More brought messie into German as a handy term for defining a person whose messiness as a matter of personality or culture, not of failure.
Are there other terms where the German language describes mess affectionately and encourages a tolerant attitude towards it? Definitely. We did a little brain storming today around a breakfast table in Germany and came up with plenty of words that can be used to describe a mess of possessions in a positive light:
For a garden that is in a mess, one only needs to declare that it is naturbelassen. There's also a wealth of robust, humorous and colloquial phrases in defence of a mess on your desk:
The idiomatic wie bei Hempels unterm Sofa is perhaps not positive, but implies that one's mess is more a matter of cultural attitude than of failure.
The hidden roomful or closet of mess is the Rumpelkammer, a fairly neutral word that is related to der Rümpel (junk), and this brings us to entrümpeln, a lovely German word for getting rid of junk. Look up the Yellow Pages under Entrümpelung and you'll find businesses that clear out homes where the tenants are too sick or too dead to do it themselves (much more efficient and sometimes more profitable than holding a Flohmarkt).
Der Messie is capitalized and given male gender and does not, so far, seem to inflect other than as plural die Messies.
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Messie, der
Mainstream, der
This is one of the arsenal of disparaging terms that German writers can use to suggest that their own obscure tastes or opinions are far superior to the majority tastes of their parents, children, cousins and other contemporaries. The idea is to explain your own eccentric opinions or musical tastes and then patronizingly point out that they are not yet appreciated by the Philistines of der Mainstream. In English, the main stream is literally the principal current in a body of water, and one can thus speak of mainstream tastes, opinions and science (in adjectival use, the two words can be merged), meaning the normal, conventional and prevailing point of view. Interestingly, the phrase has a positive character in English: the writer usually describes some other person's nutty ideas and then gently explains that they cut no ice with the mainstream experts. There is even a verb, to mainstream, meaning to establish a previously eccentric idea within the canon on accepted views. The negative connotation in German is an interesting example of the fascination with dissidence that Somerset Maugham notes in Of Human Bondage. A comparable example of this patronizing treatment of anything common is the phrase im Volksmund, which one uses to quote a mocking German word or phrase while affecting not to be amused at it or pretending to be personally unwilling to use the term (although one really is doing so). Hamburger Abendblatt writer Matthias Gretzschel for example describes a Dresden bridge thus: die Loschwitzer Elbbrücke, die im Volksmund völlig zu Recht "Blaues Wunder" genannt wird (2008-07-05). One supposes that his mother or father had used the phrase Blaues Wunder but Gretzschel feels it is too trite by his own personal standards of originality. Der Mainstream is capitalized, given masculine gender and may be pronounced with an uvular R. It has its stress shifted from the second syllable (English) to the first (German). ... Read More
Model, das
Model can be a dangerous term in German, since it is used in small ads in newspapers such as the Hamburger Morgenpost as a euphemism for a prostitute. One should be careful to avoid any ambiguity when applying the word to an honest working girl enhancing some clothes with her smile. The Duden distinguishes das Model with one L (plural die Models) from das Modell with a double L (plural die Modelle). The former is regarded by Germans as a true Anglicism, and can only be applied to fashion models. The latter is a multilayered German term that can variously mean a prototype, a miniature replica (Modelleisenbahn) or an artist's (frequently human) model. But the latter has also acquired senses of the English word model, including that of a scientific model or of a model of car (derived term: die Modellpolitik). To avoid ambiguity when referring to a female demonstrator of clothes, the media often use inflated terms such as das Fotomodel, or, since the wild success of a German knockoff of America's Next Top Model, das Topmodel. One recent dpa story about das Magermodel (below) described the workers as das Topmodel or das Supermodel, but in only two instances deep in the text as plain old das Model.
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