‘Bauklotzartigewortzusammensetzung’

Mark Twain had a notoriously thorny relationship with German, a language he gamely tried to conquer. His main beef was with its knotty grammar: ‘Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.’ He cast a satirical eye over its vocabulary too: ‘These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions,’ he wrote of such linguistic whoppers as ‘Unabhängigkeitserklärungen’ (declarations of independence).

Many a German student would recognise Twain’s perplexed awe at a language that positively encourages Lego-like word-building (which would go something like ‘Bauklotzartigewortzusammensetzung’). They would also, however, as Twain himself surely did, relish a suppleness that allows for endless extension with such majestic results. Ben Schott, author and creator of the successful (and much ripped-off) Miscellany brand, has clearly seen the potential. His Schottenfreude is a homage to German’s capacity for word-confection.