English or the Babylonian confusion in action

This post is going to be just as one-sided as you might guess, but I hope to elucidate nevertheless a real phenomenon.

I was thinking about writing my posts in English back when I started this blog, but I chose to do otherwise, because I didn't feel comfortable choosing the right expressions. For instance, I don't really know what the English translation for the word Sorge is. So, one might say worry, one might say care, and English people will be quick to point out the splendour of English in that it captures such fine nuances, which, however, I perceive as extremely annoying, because I'm not interested in painting the basic drive as either a thing of hysterical women or benign kings.

You see, I'd simply like to talk about that basic drive itself in a neutral way, but English doesn't allow me to.

And then there are other cases, in which I do know the translation, but am reluctant to use it, like with sagacity for Verstand. The problem here is that sagacity sounds like a property akin to beauty, whereas I mean a faculty akin to reason. So what should I do? Coin the word understand used as a noun? Cats have a well developed understand? I might use understanding of course, but then I replace the faculty by its operation.

So, out of these reasons I decided not to write in English. Anyway, this decision was made years ago and the reason why I'm writing about this matter now is another one altogether, namely that I came up with a theory about the English based on their language.

Now, the English have a history of being known as having double standards, in more civilised times also called bigotry (which has changed since, due to the Jews' provisions not to be ever described by this moniker themselves), or even, as Schopenhauer takes great pains not to explicitly state, liars.

Now, why is that? It can't be the genes, since those come from a good source, that is from where my own genes are coming from, so what went wrong there?

And trying to find an answer to that question, it is tempting to look at the English approximations for Sorge again, worry and care. There is no doubt in my mind that worry did originally mean the exact same thing as Sorge, but since caritas invaded its turf, it changed meaning.

You see, English is full of competing expressions, simple and easy, ghost and spirit, rest and residue, reasonable and rational to name just a few. The reason for this is not that the English have such discriminating minds that they felt the need to boldly distinguish, what no man has ever distinguished before, but to retroactively turn the rape by the French language into something meaningful. Now that all of a sudden two words for the same thing were floating around, the average English mind figured that there had to be some kind of a difference between them, and it usually conluded that the English word was about old women and the French word about kings, as in the case of worry and care.

To this day English people will say that their Germanic heritage is quaint, whereas the Latin heritage is civilised. Well, you made it so, dumb-asses!

At least that's what I like to think. But I don't want to be all negative here, and so I thought that I might add some info for the people interested in the history of Wessex and what the name Gewisse actually means in German, since Wikipedia doesn't do an overly good job explaining that.

First off, that name is super cool and it is kind of ironic that the only ones understanding that have nothing to do with the people in question. The root of it is wiss, like in wissen, to know, the English sibling of it lives in wise. Gewiß now means known for sure. So, when you apply that to a group of people it either means that they know for sure or that something about them (e.g. their loyalty, fighting skills) is known for sure, either way unabashedly arrogant and pretty much the coolest name anyone could come up with.