Video Fix: To wear a “body” and other pseudo-anglicisms in German

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My model friends mobbed me during the 1980s because I refused to wear a body during the photo shootings. The stress caused by this mobbing finally turned me into a messie. After struggling for years my doctor recommended that I go on a wellness weekend and do sports more regularly on my home trainer.

Confused? If you are a native German speaker you surely understand this little example, the words in Italics might seem perfectly fine to you in English as well as in German. They even have their own entries in the most popular German dictionary Duden. But at the latest when an overeager German tries to use those very English looking words in a conversation with English native speakers the mutual understanding breaks down.

The German language knows many of these so called pseudo-anglicisms, a term which describes words that are borrowed from English but that are used in a way native English speakers would not readily recognize or understand them.

Now tell me what does this weird gibberish mean?! Find the solution for the above mentioned example and many more in two videos of the US-American video blogger Dana Newman on her Youtube Channel “Wanted Adventure”. She regularly talks about her experiences of living in Germany and the differences between languages and cultures.

Written by Martina Christen
Study visitor at TermCoord

Student in Multilingual and Multicultural Communication