What’s the woke for Der Führer?

I don’t often feel sympathy for the plight of the Germans, but this has to be one of those rare instances. For Duden, the German equivalent of our Oxford English Dictionary, has declared war on gender-specific nouns.

Anglophone countries have it easy because English isn’t a gendered language. Our nouns all resemble neutered eunuchs in a harem, neither masculine nor feminine.

Hence the task facing our vociferous woke minority is simple: it only has a few personal pronouns to contend with, and perhaps also nouns suggesting masculinity, such as milkman, postman and, in due course I’m sure, the Royal Mail.

Replace a few singular personal pronouns with genderless plurals, ‘man’ at the end of words with ‘person’, convert all actresses into actors and hey presto – Bob’s your parent’s sibling, and so is Fanny. Even though English becomes less mellifluous, such progressive transformations fall short of wreaking total havoc.

Not so with gendered tongues. Romance languages have two noun genders, while Germanic and Slavic ones boast a whopping three. Thus, an English ‘table’ is a eunuch, a French one is a woman, and a Russian one is a man. (Parenthetically, Russian speakers like me often sound ludicrous in French when calling their guests to le table.)

The question remains: how do you castrate nouns in gendered languages? You can’t, not entirely, as German lexicographers admit ruefully. Personally, I think they give up too easily.

There are at least two avenues open to them. First, they can abolish their der and die nouns altogether and turn them all into das. That’ll take some getting used to, but, if ordered to do so, the Germans will manage.

The other possibility is abolishing the German language and switching to English instead, Singapore-style. Such linguistic appropriation would be the more radical option, but perhaps on balance the less painful one. After all, most Germans already speak English vell.

My German isn’t good enough to recommend specific morphological changes to nouns. For example, the German for Chancellor is Kanzler. However, at present that job is held by Angie Merkel, who’s all woman, as anyone who has seen her youthful nude photos will confirm. That’s why her job description is feminised to Kanzlerin.

I don’t have a clue how either word can be neutered, but I’m sure there must be a way. And what will happen if the Germans revert to their previous political system and acquire someone called der Führer? Oh well, I suppose we’ll have to blow up that bridge when we get to it.

One way or another, the problem facing German lexicographers seems insurmountable. They realise this too, which is why they set their sights slightly lower.

They see in their crosshairs what grammarians call the ‘generic masculine’, sometimes conveyed as ‘a man embraces a woman’. Thus words describing professions that may be practised by men, women or other are usually masculine in German, which is offensive beyond words.

I shan’t bother you with specifics of how the compilers of Duden corrected such egregious offences. However, I’d like to know exactly who is offended by traditional usages, and why.

In our globalised world, Germany can’t be all that different from the US or Britain. Hence German gendered words must only rankle a tiny minority ideologically predisposed to feel, or rather feign, such offence.

This allays the fear first expressed by Tocqueville and later echoed by Mill, that democracy may bring about the tyranny of the majority. They had no way of knowing that modernity is less John Stuart Mill than Cecil B DeMille.

Increasingly, our problem is a tyrannical minority lording it over a majority of lemmings, effectively powerless but mollycoddled with an elaborate spectacle of pluralism.

Driven by its pathological anomie and loathing of everything traditional, this elite made up of a few hundred semi-educated politicians, academics and hacks indoctrinates the majority in how to talk, think and feel. Following their cajoling we are all supposed to roll on the floor and froth at the mouth every time someone mentions a postman or refers to an anonymous doctor as a ‘he’.

Most people go along because they lack the elite’s passions. When told to say ‘postperson’, ‘fire fighter’ or, for all I know, Personhattan, they just shrug their acquiescence: well, okay, if it’s that important to you, mate.

The task of the tyrannical German minority is both harder and easier. It’s harder because German is a gendered language, and cleansing it of gendered nouns is like cleaning the Augean stables. It’s less Herculean, however, because the Germans are more conditioned than the Anglo-Saxons to take orders.

So perhaps Kanzlerin Merkel can just issue a decree that henceforth all collective gendered nouns are verboten. And there you go, alles in Ordnung, as they say in Germany. Ethnic cleansing is no longer in fashion, but lexical cleansing reigns supreme.