Gender Is Fake, Culture Is Fake, Dragons Are Real

Here’s a fun fact about me. So, the first part of this post is about a food item of undetermined gender. And when I first planned this issue of weirdgerman, I initially was going to include another food item that I thought also had a dubious gender. Because, my whole life, I said der Brezel (that’s pretzel), until I moved to Bavaria, where people eat a lot of pretzels, and where everyone said die Brezel, or die Breze.

Then, as I always do with these, I went into my research phase, where I start earnestly looking up the words I want to write about.

And so, I was this week years old when I learned that I’d been wrong all along. Feminine pretzels are not a regional thing. They’re a universal thing. Nobody but me says der Brezel. I’ve spent my whole life misgendering one of my favorite foods.

You know, if you’re learning German, and you get noun genders wrong sometimes, do not even worry. Evidently, so do we.

Today I am moderately embarrassed to present to you

• said food item that can be any gender you want her/him/it to be,
• the German term for the little bathroom items bag you take on travels with you, you know, the one you always forget to put your hairbrush in,
• and a cooler word for “vocabulary,” to add to your vocabulary.

Genderfluid Hazelnut Spread

If you’ve ever learned even the tiniest bit of German, you probably know that we’re one of those gendered languages. Yeah, I don’t like it either. This whole blog was born because I mostly thoroughly enjoy my language, and that includes its silliness, but having gendered nouns is difficult to defend, I’ll be honest.

So, look. If I’m telling you “grab me the lid of the box which is painted green,” in English, you don’t know if it’s the lid or the box that’s painted green. In German, I’d say “hol mir den Deckel der Box, der grün gestrichen ist,” and you would know that it’s the lid (Deckel) that’s painted green. Because the article used in the relative clause is gendered accordingly to the noun you’re referring to.

And that does make sense. I’ve run into this conundrum in English many times, and it gets awkward sometimes, doesn’t it! German and all the other gendered languages found a solution for it, I guess. Still seems like we could have found a solution that sucks less. Because, of course, the gender of inanimate objects is almost always entirely arbitrary. More than that, it’s not even the same across gendered languages! In French, the moon is feminine and the sun is masculine. In German, it’s the other way around. Why? Who knows. Who fucking knows. Knowing humans and history in general, I bet for a lot of words there’s an explanation buried somewhere in our past, but if it doesn’t immediately make sense to learners, then that doesn’t help anyone. So if it’s all arbitrary, it just seems like we could have also left gender out of it and sort our words into other, similarly arbitrary categories.

But we didn’t! And now I am stuck with a language where chairs have a gender, but for some reason we still don’t have a gender-neutral pronoun that isn’t “it.” (I do use “it.” Nothing but respect though for my siblings out there pioneering neopronouns for Germans because we have to do everything ourselves.)

So anyway, Nutella is genderfluid.

I did not set out to get heated about gender in language, but nobody is surprised that it happened anyway. Initially, I wanted to write about one of my favorite things, which is also becoming a staple of this blog, which is: people arguing over food!

Nobody in Germany can agree on what gender Nutella is. The truth of course is that Nutella is a spread and doesn’t have a gender. Because that’s silly. (So it’s agender. Yay!) But you know what I mean.

Nutella is an Italian product, which means it is not a German word. As I said, gendered words in other languages don’t always have the same genus as they would in German. This creates a conundrum when using words from other gendered languages in German. Sometimes, we use the same gender: the French word contenance exists in German as well, and it’s feminine in French, so we use die Contenance as well. Sometimes, though, we grab a word from another language, do not translate it, but still give it the gender that its translated German counterpart has. The French chanson means song and is feminine. The German Lied also means song and is neutral. Sometimes, for certain genres of music, we use the French Chanson, but we give it the gender of the German Lied, so in German it’s das Chanson.

This especially happens with words we yoink from English, since none of those have any gender. Then we can just apply our own all willy-nilly.

The problem with this is once again that there’s no rules. There is no way to infer which word will have which gender, you have to just know. But sometimes, if enough people don’t know and just start saying whatever, stuff like the Nutella conundrum happens.

Das Nutella (neutral) is widespread, and it’s what I myself use as well. It’s just a thing. Nothing about Nutella suggests either gender, and it’s a foreign word, so many people default to neutral.

Die Nutella (feminine) is, I think, in second place in terms of what people here use the most. Because she ends in -ella! Clearly Nutella is a girl’s name.

Der Nutella (masculine) is very rare, but there is reason behind it too. The German word for spread is Brotaufstrich (from Brot = bread and aufstreichen = to spread on), which is masculine. And since Nutella is a Brotaufstrich, it would also be masculine.

People get into heated arguments about this. I used to know someone who refused to pass me the Nutella across the breakfast table unless I gendered her correctly when I asked for her. It’s not so much a regional difference, as far as I know, but more like a cognitive one. Everyone has their own idea about what gender Nutella is. My own personal theory is that we’re all projecting, and so I know that Nutella and I are both highly desired by many people, fought over across the country, and have no gender.

I Got Culture in a Bag

You know those little baggies you jam all your bathroom stuff into when you travel? And they come in fun designs and they’re always bursting with stuff because you shove your whole hair and skin care routine into them, and then when you get to your destination everything there is a little bit wet, but you’re not sure with what, because none of the shampoo bottles fully burst, but clearly someone’s leaking?

Just me?

Well, it’s occurring to me that I genuinely have no idea how common that particular experience is. But anyway, I’m talking about toiletries bags. My dictionary says that’s what they’re called in American English. It also says that in British English it’s just a toilet bag, which in my opinion is way funnier. It’s a bag for my toilet! You don’t wanna open that.

The German word is Kulturbeutel. That’s right, Kultur like culture. None of this toilet stuff. Nothing but culture in our Beutel. (Yes, a Beutel is a kind of bag.)

Coming from a background in biotechnology (yeah, deep lore about the author here), that always seemed a bit concerning to me. Calling it a toiletries bag at least makes sense. There’s toiletries in there. How did the culture get in mine, though? What kind of culture is it? If I, say, forget some used unnamed toiletries in there long enough, then yeah, there’s gonna be cultures in there for sure. Now what’s worse, the British toilet bag or the German bacteria bag?

It’s not about bacteria, of course. I did have to look that up though. It did not occur to me that culture could also refer to taking care of one’s body. It’s some sort of Latin thing, because of course it is. Apparently the word “cultus” can mean, I’ll be honest, just about fuckin’ anything. It’s from the verb colere, which, hey, does not sound like cultus at all, and in my little Latin dictionary, colere has eight different meanings. When this happens in English, I’m always lenient, because English is a Frankenstein language, of course words would have many meanings. What does Latin have to say for itself?

Nothing. It’s dead. Just like all the bacteria in my toilet bag.

So that’s a mystery solved for you all. Germany calls them culture bags because one of the eight different meanings of culture is taking care of something, including your own body. You would think this now also applies to the many other modern languages with Latin roots! Nope. Everyone else has toilet bags. Only Germany has c—you know what, actually, I don’t want to finish that joke.

I Am a Dragon and Weird German Words Are My Hoard

We’ll end on another word that doesn’t seem to exist like this in many other languages (except for Dutch. I love you, Dutch). A lot of languages seem to go for “vocabulary” to describe the entirety of words someone knows. And that word also exists in German! Das Vokabular is a usable word for what I’m trying to express. But much more common is der Wortschatz.

I’ve seen a few similar compound words in other languages, most of which seem to amount to “wordstock,” which I’ve learned is an English term as well. And that does come closer to what Wortschatz means. It won’t surprise you that Wort means word. I have also seen “word-hoard” on Wiktionary, although I’ve never seen anyone actually use that.

That is exactly what Wortschatz means, however.

Some of my readers, the ones that are here because of a certain German-ish video game character, might know that Schatz is a German term of endearment. That is because the word itself originally means treasure. A treasure chest, for instance, is a Schatztruhe, which is also the first thing my mind goes to when I hear Schatz. That means it’s also the first place it goes when I hear Wortschatz. In my mind, my vocabulary is a big ole pirate chest brimming with really, really weird words.

You can also use Schatz for hoard in the sense of a dragon hoard, which brings us back to word-hoard. So I think we should all start using that. Listen, “vocabulary” is fine. I don’t mind it. It’s an okay word. Kind of like toiletries bag. But in this here large pile of treasure upon which I sit, vocabulary’s pretty far down. Wortschatz is right here on top with me.

That, or you can go right back to using Schatz only as a petname. Anyone who has a linguistics babe, start calling them mein Wortschatz. Mein Wortschatzi. Wortschätzchen.

sources:

• German Wikipedia entry for Genus
• German Wiktionary entries for Kulturbeutel and Wortschatz
• https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/Das-Genus-von-Fremdw%C3%B6rtern
• https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/der-die-das-nutella
• https://www.navigium.de/latein-woerterbuch/cultus