Realitätsflucht
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Another of those kraftvoll German words that grips you viscerally and won't let you go, like Schadenfreude (memes). Naturally, you could also say "Eskapismus", "Wirklichkeitsflucht", or "Weltflucht" to get across roughly the same idea, but it just wouldn't have the oomph of Realitätsflucht.
What made me think of "Realitätsflucht" at the present juncture? This article by john Schindler:
Top U.S. Spies Warn: War with China Looms…And It’s Not Looking Good
The intelligence alarm is pinging Red in the Western Pacific – but is anybody, even the White House, paying attention?
Top Secret Umbra (7/18/23)
The operative sentence is this:
Realitätsflucht (“flight from reality”) is a fitting German word that English lacks a precise equivalent for, but which the Pentagon needs right now to describe its official attitudes towards the rising storm in the Western Pacific.
Given that contemporary English speakers are increasingly allergic to foreign words, I doubt that there's much hope we'll borrow this one, even though both constituent components have close cognates in English.
Selected readings
- "Schadenfreudeful" (4/20/19)
- "Googlefreude, Googleschaden, Schadengoogle…" (1/02/07)
- "The Germans have a word for it" (9/9/09)
Taylor, Philip said,
July 20, 2023 @ 6:41 am
"contemporary English speakers are increasingly allergic to foreign words" — I would be interested to learn what research has been conducted into this, and also to learn whether it affect some populations (American, British, New Zealand, etc.) more than others.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 20, 2023 @ 7:40 am
"a fitting German word that English lacks a precise equivalent for"
*sigh*
Really? Realität = Reality; Flucht = Flight. They're perfectly cognate, but because English doesn't smush words together with the same avidity as German, we also need a "from" here to make it work. But yeah, "precise[ly] equivalent". Same thing with Gotterdämmerung ("twilight of the gods"), Schadenfreude ("rejoicing in the misfortune of others"), u.s.w. /etc.
It doesn't make it any less "precisely equivalent" if you have to add a preposition or two to make it work — just ask French.
Victor Mair said,
July 20, 2023 @ 7:45 am
From Bernard Cadogan:
"Fugue" is an almost 4 Letter word, Victor, that provides the same semantic drain-lid as Realitätsflucht ?
Victor Mair said,
July 20, 2023 @ 7:48 am
Right you are, Bernard.
At first I didn't understand what you meant, but then I found this online (Google dictionary):
=====
Music
a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
Psychiatry
a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.
=====
And this from etymonline:
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=fugue
fugue (n.)
type of musical composition, 1590s, fuge, from Italian fuga, literally "flight," also "ardor," from Latin fuga "a running away, act of fleeing," from fugere "to flee" (see fugitive (adj.)). Current English spelling (1660s) is from the French version of the Italian word.
A Fugue is a composition founded upon one subject, announced at first in one part alone, and subsequently imitated by all the other parts in turn, according to certain general principles to be hereafter explained. The name is derived from the Latin word fuga, a flight, from the idea that one part starts on its course alone, and that those which enter later are pursuing it. ["Fugue," Ebenezer Prout, 1891]
Peter Grubtal said,
July 20, 2023 @ 8:02 am
As a long-term resident of Germany, I don't recall hearing or seeing "Realitätsflucht" so much, and it strikes me as a piece of journalese.
More common in my opinion is "realitätsfern", but that's an adjective of course.
Olaf Zimmermann said,
July 20, 2023 @ 8:16 am
trafficker, n. a flight attendant
(wouldn't make it into the AHD, I think.)
Bloix said,
July 20, 2023 @ 8:45 am
I have no German, but a little googling leads me to suspect that the word originated in psychology and that a literal translation might be dissociation. This is a word implying very serious conditions (eg multiple personality disorder), so maybe denial would be better translation if what's intended is a sort of metaphorical neurosis.
Victor Mair said,
July 20, 2023 @ 9:06 am
P.S. on "fugue" from Bernard Cadogan
Yes it is used a lot in British English to describe a flight from reality, an evasion of responsibility. It is what I call in NZ English the flight down the Kiwihole, the only flight those burrowing birds know !
Paul Frank said,
July 20, 2023 @ 10:25 am
Maori is arguably less of a foreign language in New Zealand than English, but it is a minority language. What's remarkable about New Zealand English is its enthusiastic adoption of Maori words in recent decades. The Victoria University ‘Language in the Workplace Project’ has documented how both Maoris and Pakehas code-switch between different styles of Maori-influenced New Zealand English (words, pronunciation, pitch and even laughter) to assert a Maori social identity or to signal solidarity and closeness to Maori colleagues. The growing use of Maori words in New Zealand English is unique in the world in a significant respect: an endangered language (Maori) is contributing a large number of words to the world’s most dominant lingua franca (English). During the first wave of borrowing of Maori words, some 200 years ago, many flora and fauna words were borrowed; in recent years, it is social culture terms that are increasingly adopted, e.g., aroha (love), whaea (woman, teacher), and tangi (Maori funeral). A large-scale lexical transfer of this type from a language that was almost extinct a few years ago to the world’s most dominant language has never been documented elsewhere. See Juliane House, Jochen Rehbein, Multilingual Communication, John Benjamins Publishing, 2004, 140-147; David Tyre et al., Maori Loanwords: A Corpus of New Zealand English Tweets, https://felipebravom.com/publications/loanwords2019.pdf
Taylor, Philip said,
July 20, 2023 @ 11:04 am
Re. « P.S. on "fugue" from Bernard Cadogan
Yes it is used a lot in British English to describe a flight from reality, an evasion of responsibility. It is what I call in NZ English the flight down the Kiwihole, the only flight those burrowing birds know ! ».
Obviously a word can be used a lot in British English (with a given sense) without my ever having come across it, but I would have thought that I might have come across it once or twice in my 76 years. However, that is definitely not the case, and this usage is therefore completely novel to me.
Coby said,
July 20, 2023 @ 11:26 am
Whenever I have seen "fugue" used in the psychiatric sense, it's invariably as "fugue state", never by itself.
Karen Lofstrom said,
July 20, 2023 @ 12:00 pm
English speakers in the Hawaiian Islands use many Native Hawaiian words. Also a lot of borrowing from Japanese.
martin schwartz said,
July 20, 2023 @ 6:21 pm
Hmm, De Sade and Freud are anagrammatically present in Schadenfreude.
MS
AntC said,
July 20, 2023 @ 6:52 pm
@PhilipT …t I would have thought that I might have come across it ['fugue' in the sense mental state] once or twice in my 76 years. However, that is definitely not the case, and this usage is therefore completely novel to me.
I'm astonished. I've known of that sense almost since I knew of the musical structure sense; pretty much as I discovered it was from Italian for 'flight'. Have you heard of 'flight of fancy'?
Bloix said,
July 20, 2023 @ 10:33 pm
The dissociative-mental-state meaning of fugue is in my experience limited to psychology and hasn't moved over into general use in the way that other terms originating in psychology have done. Examples of words moving into general use via pop psychology that we've discussed on this blog are cope and denial. Other examples we haven't discussed, I don't think, are stress, trigger, neurotic, projection, cognitive dissonance. But not fugue, at least to my knowledge.
Bernard Cadogan says to the contrary that in Britain fugue has made this move and that there's a lay meaning of fugue in British English that means no more than an unconscious refusal to acknowledge a reality in order to evade responsibility. Well, I'm an American and so I really don't have a right to an opinion. But I'm willing to say that I'm skeptical. And it doesn't surprise me that Philip Taylor hasn't encountered it.
Phillip Helbig said,
July 21, 2023 @ 12:22 am
@Peter Grubtal: Yes.
Helmut Kohl once said that Realtität and Wirklichkeit don’t have much to do with each other. :-)
Hans Adler said,
July 21, 2023 @ 1:33 am
As a native German speaker, I agree with Benjamin E. Orsatti. The equivalent of Realitätsflucht is flight from reality. The differences in meaning seem to be minimal, the relation to Eskapismus/escapism essentially the same.
Once again it comes down to the canard that German has so many more long and strange words than English. Which depending on how you interpret it is either not true at all or an artifact caused by spelling rules / accidents of how you demarcate words. I can think of the following contributing factors to this misconception:
1. Whether something is a word or a multi-word phrase depends on the writing system and/or the grammar used to describe the language, not the language itself. If linguists even have a concept of what a word is in a language without a published grammar and without a writing system, then it doesn't seem to be generally known. This problem doesn't even seem to be mentioned in introductions to linguistics, and I haven't been able to find in-depth information anywhere else, either. When I tried to get information on this point in an introductory linguistics class for a computational linguistics program, I was treated like a troublemaker trying to expose gaps in the teachers' knowledge.
2. Some people implicitly limit the meaning of 'word' to dictionary words or words that have appeared in formal publications.
3. Germanic languages can form compound nouns by just prepending a word (often a noun) to a base noun. The case and number of the prepended word can vary, and sometimes a fugue letter is added. All of this is more of an art rather than a set of grammatical rules. For example, Austrian and German Standard German, which are almost identical, often disagree on this point, as in Austrian Schmerzengeld vs German Schmerzensgeld (damages for pain and suffering).
4. Forming compound nouns as in 3 is more productive in German than in English. I guess on the German side, contributing factors to this difference are the generally more conservative nature of German and the German linguistic purism of the 17th/18th century, which relied a lot on this method. On the English side, the influence of French probably plays a role.
5. According to German spelling rules, compound nouns as in 3 are always spelled without spaces, even for ad hoc compositions. If they must be structured for easier parsing, hyphens are used. Using spaces like in English would require a new grammatical concept for words ending in a linking s, which unlike in English can often not be explained as a plural or genitive. Our spelling rules hide this murky point of grammar by making it a matter of morphology.
6. According to English spelling rules, compound nouns as in 3 are spelled with spaces until they have become so common that people start to use hyphens and ultimately even drop these.
In the particular case of Realitätsflucht, we actually have such a linking s that explains why we would get a problem if we spelled it as two words. "Realitäts Flucht" would require an explanation for "Realitäts", which with the final s does not currently exist as a German word form at all.
A quick Google n-gram search suggests to me that flight from reality is a relatively rare phrase in today's English (after a period of popularity 1910-1940), and Realitätsflucht is far more common in today's German. I compared "flight from reality/escapism" to "Realitätsflucht/Eskapismus". But I think much of this difference is explained by the lengths of these words in syllables: 6/3 in English vs 5/4 in German. And THEN we can think about a small contribution from the fact that Realitätsflucht feels a little bit more like a single word than flight from reality does.
Philip Anderson said,
July 21, 2023 @ 1:48 am
@AntC
I had never heard of the mental fugue state either, also in the UK.
“Flight of fancy” comes from flying not fleeing. Although this (popular) newspaper conflates them: “The word ‘fugue’ means ‘running away’ or ‘flights of fancy’ in French”:
https://metro.co.uk/2017/03/26/what-is-fugue-state-how-i-ended-up-forgetting-my-life-and-taking-on-a-new-one-6535260/amp/
Taylor, Philip said,
July 21, 2023 @ 2:18 am
AntC — "Have you heard of 'flight of fancy'?" — yes, but I see no connection with "fugue". The latter would appear to be about fleeing, while the former would appear to be about flying.
John Swindle said,
July 21, 2023 @ 3:31 am
As far as I know the psychological sense of "fugue" in American English is as described by Merriam-Webster online: "a disturbed state of consciousness in which the one affected seems to perform acts in full awareness but upon recovery cannot recollect the acts performed." Sort of a trance. It's not hard to connect that to Realitätsflucht, but I don't see the two as the same.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 21, 2023 @ 7:43 am
Hans Adler said,
[…]
"Whether something is a word or a multi-word phrase depends on the writing system and/or the grammar used to describe the language, not the language itself. If linguists even have a concept of what a word is in a language without a published grammar and without a writing system, then it doesn't seem to be generally known. This problem doesn't even seem to be mentioned in introductions to linguistics, and I haven't been able to find in-depth information anywhere else, either. When I tried to get information on this point in an introductory linguistics class for a computational linguistics program, I was treated like a troublemaker trying to expose gaps in the teachers' knowledge."
— You and I will get along just fine, Hans. I had a similar experience, in nursery school, when the teacher was telling us about how mammals only give birth live, and I wouldn't shut up about the platypus, which lays eggs. Good thing I hadn't known about echidnas back then.
[…]
"3. Germanic languages can form compound nouns by just prepending a word (often a noun) to a base noun. The case and number of the prepended word can vary, and sometimes a fugue letter is added."
— I see what you did there. Also, I think you may be onto something regarding the relation between the degree of conservatism of a Germanic language and its propensity to feature Reallylongsubstantiveagglomerations. Take Icelandic, for example, which gives us such gems as: "Vaðlaheiðarvegavinnuverkfærageymsluskúrslyklakippuhringurinn (the key ring to the tool work shed in the road works of Vaðlaheiði, a mountain road in North Iceland). Is the Icelandic language "conservative"? — Hel, it's practically Old Norse! I had an Icelandic roommate in college (Penn, A & S, '00) who told me that most educated Icelanders can read the Eddas in the original language.
[…]
"And THEN we can think about a small contribution from the fact that Realitätsflucht feels a little bit more like a single word than flight from reality does."
— It does, though, doesn't it? Even though it's only a syllable longer, the three-word manifestation does tend to break up the "singularity" of the thing, doesn't it? Maybe "fugue" is better in that respect.
[…]
"6. According to English spelling rules, compound nouns as in 3 are spelled with spaces until they have become so common that people start to use hyphens and ultimately even drop these."
— That sounds about right. And it can be frustrating when you're on the cusp of that change. For the life of me, I can't remember whether to write "courthouse" or "court house" or "workday" or "work day", although auto-correct tells me that both should be one word, and that the word "auto correct" should be two words without a hyphen!
/df said,
July 21, 2023 @ 8:30 am
As an English-English-speaker I was probably aware of the Realitätsflucht sense of "fugue" but would have considered it metaphorical outside a psychological context and very much deprioritised in favour of the musical sense.
Ross Presser said,
July 21, 2023 @ 8:59 am
When I saw the comment from Bernard about the psychiatric meaning of fugue, I was reminded of the work of science fiction author Alfred Bester. One of his stories was titled "The Four-Hour Fugue". He also dropped the word in a few other stories like "The Demolished Man".
He also wrote a book called "The Deceivers" in which the main character, Rogue Winter, is a Maori.
All that was running through my mind when I got to the next comment, talking about NZ English borrowing words from the Maori language.
Strange coincidence.
RfP said,
July 21, 2023 @ 11:48 am
I can’t help but notice a tendency in some of the comments to downplay the actual sound of Realitätsflucht.
To borrow from Victor’s opening paragraph, “Naturally, you could also say ‘flight from reality’ to get across roughly the same idea, but it just wouldn't have the oomph of Realitätsflucht.”
I’ll let a couple of experts weigh in on this.
First, to introduce a term of art, from the Glossary in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism:
(Most people writing about this concept seem to use “melopoeia” these days.)
And second, from Ursula K. Le Guin, with the most relevant part in bold:
– “Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness,” in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, 158-159.
David Marjanović said,
July 21, 2023 @ 3:04 pm
I'm not sure I've ever encountered Realitätsflucht; Realitätsverweigerung is a common term, though. Literally "reality refusal", translates to "denial" (as in "being in denial").
The adjective/adverb beratungsresistent is semantically related; it means "resistant to advice", "too stupid to take any advice".
N. N. said,
July 31, 2023 @ 7:27 am
In Finnish there is a fairly common noun, "todellisuuspako", which is an exact equivalent of "Realitätsflucht" in that it is a compound of 'reality' (todellisuus) and 'escape' (pako). But it is closer to meaning to 'escapism' than to 'fugue', although it might conceivably also be used to mean the latter.
I suspect that it may nevertheless be a translation of the German term or a term from another Germanic language. (Finnish has "vahingonilo", which is definitely a translation of "Schadenfreude": 'damage' + 'joy'.)