The other morning on the wireless (Home Service), Stephen Evans, the BBC’s man in Berlin, mentioned Angela Merkel’s favourite Anglicism: Shitstorm. So I suppose it is quite all right to discuss it here, between adults.
The word has been voted Anglicism of the year by a jury headed by Professor Dr Anatol Stefanowitsch. It beat Stresstest into second place. Both may be linked to the euro-crisis, but Shitstorm in German has a specific field of usage, referring to the kerfuffle that people stir up on the internet until it reaches a critical mass (to use another metaphor), and something has to be done. An example was the criticism of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the German minister of defence, who was found to have plagiarised part of his doctoral thesis. In Britain dodgy dossiers are an established part of government, but German disapproval went beyond mockery, and the minister resigned in March 2011.
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