Ungainly Acronyms

The thing we’re trying to do, to prevent another 9/11, keeps getting rebranded.

Stylistically, the low point came with the designation “GWOT”, which stands for “Global War on Terror”.

Those who prosecute this mission, normally pronounce it “GEE-watt” (though the acronym has largely fallen out of use);  but I persist in pronouncing it as a monosyllable,  the gwot -- rhyming with blot, not, sot, rot, snot, and other words less respectable still.   “How goes the gwot?” I greet those thus engaged.

An even uglier acronym (if such be possible), likewise self-important in origin, was used, satirically, against Hitler:

Before it was over, his commanding generals  were referring to him bitterly as Gröfaz:  a name ugly enough to have served some monster of mythology, some twisted kobold or goblin  embodying and spreading evil.  In actuality, it was a contraction of the title that General Keitel bestowed upon the Führer  in June 1940:  Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten.

-- Gordon Craig, Germany 1866-1945 (1978), p. 714

As to the pronunciation of this ungainly confection:  it is best described as something between a grunt and a groan, followed by an escape of acrid gas.
(For a similar exercise in non-IPA transcription, cf. the case of "oahspe".)
[More empirically:  GRU-fahts, with "U" as in "put".]

For a nice rhyming poem about this unusual creature, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/08/gare-le-grofaz.html

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

The US military-diplomatic world  abounds in acronyms pronounced phonetically as words.   Another ungainly one, designating (so to speak) the “Gröfaz” of the United States, is POTUS;  he rules over CONUS.   -- In the opening episode of “West Wing”, a young fellow gets an emergency call on his cell, explaining to his girlfriend that it is from “Potus”.  She said the fellow should learn not to call at ungodly hours, and moreover “Potus” is a strange name.  “It means ‘President Of The United States’”, he explains.

Note:  The pronunciations of such things is normally alphabetic-phonetic, rather than etymological.  Thus CONUS (meaning, ‘the Lower 48’) is pronounced CONE-uss, with long “o”, even though it is from  CONtinental United States, with short.

~

Und nun:  HoGeSa.

Further, re Cambodia in May 1970:

Formation d'un gouvernement en exil, le GRUNK (gouvernement  royal d'union nationale du Kampuchéa).

-- Mémoires du XXe Siècle , vol. 8, 1970-1979 (Bordas, 1989), p. 56

.

Word of the Day: “Pigovian” (expanded)

[update of a note originally published  4 Dec 2012]

The lead item in this week’s New Yorker introduces (with considerable fanfare) a new word:  Pigovian, as the adjective derived from the name of an otherwise little-celebrated economist, one Pigou, who, many years ago, floated the idea (which had surely been floating of its own accord, for millennia) that if you make a mess, you should maybe chip in to the costs of cleaning it up.   The author of this “Talk” piece, Elizabeth Kolbert, is a frequent writer on climate-change matters, and her proposal is that the general public now embrace the designation of a carbon tax as “Pigovian”, in that it pays back some of the costs of global warming.

Now, it might well be imagined that the suggestion is superfluous, and that the notion already has a name:  nuisance tax.  Yet that phrase has already long been defined in an entirely unrelated sense:  not of a tax on nuisances, (the way a luxury tax is a tax on luxuries), but (apparently -- it is really not a happy coinage) a tax that is considered to be itself a nuisance (in that it is not large enough to qualify as a burden, say).  As Merriam-Webster © defines it:

an excise tax collected in small amounts on a wide range of commodities directly from the consumer

Yet, even did the old phrase nuisance tax mean what, syntagmatically, it ought to mean, there is an argument for using a more distinctive word for a category that is growing in importance, as ever-wider circles of citizens become alert to what economists have long called the tragedy of the commons.   For, once you have a word like Pigovian, entirely unburdened by other associations, you can readily extract it from the phrase Pigovian tax, and use elliptic derivata like “Pigovian considerations” or “counter-Pigovian” (where “counter-nuisance” here wouldn’t work at all, since it means the opposite of what “counter-Pigovian” would mean, i.e. ‘pro-nuisance’).  Such relationships between morphology and semantics are discussed in my book The Semantics of Form in Arabic, and form the core of the chapter “The Stokes Conjecture”.

[Update 23 April 2017]  This just in:  a Pigovian accord:
http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/norway-first-to-ratify-polluter-pays-treaty

So!  Now for the morpho-phonological characteristics of this rather odd-looking word, Pigovian.   The base-form is pronounced pig-OO, yet the adjective comes out pig-OH-vee-an.  Why?

Unlike sturdy old Anglo-Saxon suffixes like -ness, -dom, -hood-, -kin-, or -ly, which allow themselves to be simply tacked-on at the end of a word, leaving all else as is, the Latin-derived -ian is a tyrant, demanding that the stress be moved to the immediately preceding syllable (if it wasn’t already there), and that its vowel (if not tense already) be tensed.  Thus:  Dickens (DIK-enz) vs. Dickensian (dik-ENZ-ee-an), and (with vowel-tensing) Jacob (JAY-kub) vs. Jacobian (ja-KOH-bee an).  (Thus the derivative is pronounced in the mathematical community. An unrelated adjective with a different suffix, Jacobean, relating to history and literature, is pronounced jak-ub-EE-an.)  And as a further impudent exigency, this tyrannical suffix spurns unmediated Anschluss onto a vowel, demanding rather a bridge-consonant -v-:  thus (Bernard) Shaw vs. Shavian (SHAY-vee-an, with both vowel-tensing and inserted bridge).   As well as (in a more roundabout fashion -- this one doesn’t really count) Warsaw vs. Varsovian (rhymes with Nabokovian).  It is thus that our poor unassuming Mr. Pigou (whom I picture rather as Mr. Magoo)) becomes, adjectivally, a roaring shouting syllable-rattling PIGOVIAN.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

Note:  Strictly, the derivatum should have been Pigouvian, on the model of Peru :  Peruvian.  The word succumbed to the gravitational attracion of the plethora of words in -ovian (a productive category, given all the Slavic names in -ov/-off).  Further, why burden an already ungainly word with the stressed syllable GOO, as opposed to GO ?  This way, it gets to rhyme with a cool studly word like Jovian.

Cf. this derivatum, re Richard Montegue:   "Montegovian compositionality" (Alice ter Meulen, in

Frederick Newmeyer, ed. Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey (1988: CUP), vol. I, p. 441)

Footnote:  Something in our Teutonic blood  disdains such tricks.  Thus, instead of a morphological equivalent of Pigovian tax, German just says Pigou-steuer.  And rather than submit to the indignity of a  *Hemingwavian (hem-ing-WAY-vee-an), we go with a different suffix altogether, once that leaves vowels as they are and requires no bridge-consonant:  Hemingwayesque.    (Still not very dignified, though, as the suffix here hogs the main stress to itself, and tends to make you think of words like grotesque and burlesque.)

Morphophonology:
Compare and contrast  Babeuf => Babouvisme.

French in particular is pre-attuned to such vocalic ablaut  by the existence, side by side, of  locally-developed place-names, along with gentilés derived more transparently from the original Latin toponym.  As, Loire (from Latin Liger) => Ligérien.  Such transformations may be found even when the etymon is not Latin, as

   Aisne => Axonais
   Rhône => Rhodanien

   Reims (earlier Rheims) => Rémois

and even such acrobatics as

    Saint-Germain-des-Prés => germanopratin

    Seine-Saint-Denis => Séquanodionysien

Compare, in (British) English,  Cambridge => Cantabridgian.

There are parallels in Castilian:
   Salamanca => Salmantino

Compare, in (British) English,  Cambridge => Cantabridgian, Manchester => Mancusian.

Word of the Day: “Airman”

Since 9/11, I have worked side by side with folks in the Air Force  every day.  The universal term for any one of these is Airman.   It rhymes precisely with chairman -- which means that the -man is here merely suffixal, the vowel being unstressed and qualitatively reduced:  chairm’n, airm’n.  (Phonetically, the unstressed vowel has been demoted to at most a schwa, and often has disappeared altogether, the -n becoming syllabic by compensation:  cf.  rock ‘n’ roll.  -- Contrast the vowel in stunt man, which remains full.)

Accordingly, the term *airwoman does not exist, and no-one is clamoring for it.  And no-one, but no-one, is demanding to be rechristened as *airpeople or *airpersons or *airindividuals or *Americans with airiness or whatever.

The USAF has a lot of cool slang, and perhaps sometime I’ll share it (or you… airmen  can add your favorites in a comment to this post);  but the point here is merely to notice the irenic lexical state of affairs in today’s Air Force, versus the hurry-scurrying going on over at the Marines, as reported in today’s MSM:

The Marines just took ‘man’ out of 19 job titles, and people are losing their minds

The force will rename 19 of its job titles to make occupational specialties more gender neutral. Critics argue political correctness is taking over the military.

“You’d think someone who has seen combat would have more stones.”

“You know, I was going to [complain] about PC crap … but “Infantry Assault Marine” sounds kinda cool …”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/06/28/the-marines-just-took-man-out-of-19-job-titles-and-people-are-losing-their-minds/

Now, there are neologisms and neologisms;  this batch seems to have been crafted with a good ear, at any rate. Infantry Assault Marine  does indeed sound way cool.

Non-Acronym of the day: “Jason”

The saga of Jason and the Argonauts  has spun off some delightful dubbings.  One, the “Argo” escapade, we discussed here.   Another was the secret elite group of physicists called Jason.  

An intrepid historian of science  ran down the true etymology, after an initial (indeed, “initials”) red-herring:

I asked my husband’s physicist-colleagues  “What’s Jason?” and collected the following:  Jason is an acronym fof July-August-September-October-November, the months this group of academic physicists   met secretly to solve the problems  the Defense Department couldn’t.

-- Ann Finkbeiner, The Jasons (2006), p.  xii

That suggestion quickly dissolves  in the universal solvent of Common Sense:

These stories I didn’t believe.  An acronym for months sounded silly.  [But more tellingly:] Academics couldn’t meet that long during the school year because they had institutional responsibilities.

-- id.

Another false-lead was the assertion that Jason was named after one of the members’ family dog.   Not.  The true story she tells on pages 39-40:  the wife of one of the members chose it, after the Greek myth -- most appropriate for a group that was going after the scientific equivalent of Golden Fleece.

The author adds some linguistic details:

“Jason is both a collective and a proper noun:  if you belong to Jason, you are a Jason.” (p. xiv)

Jason is usually capitalized [completely],  JASON, as though it were an acronym.  I have no idea why -- maybe because, written like a name [with only the first letter a capital], it might be taken to be a personal name.  I shall not capitalize it.

(p. xxviii)

Another reason it was initially written all-caps is that DoD and the IC often so style cover-terms.

~

The choice of Jason as a group name  is typical of the playfulness of physicists.  When DoD does the dubbing, the result is likely to be humdrum. As,

The task force was called the Defense Communications Planning Group, or DCPG, a name chosen for its meaninglessness.  (p. 77)

When a secret project does get a lexical designation, this may be chosen precisely to throw off anyone to whom the term might get leaked.  Thus, the Manhattan Project:  so named because it had nothing to do with Manhatten, and indeed was centered at locations far from any city.  One of the things they worked on (my Dad did, for one) was called “Tube-alloy”, a nicely misleading alias for uranium (which is an element, not an alloy).

On the Nature of Being: a Slacker Meditation

“Cogito, ergo sum,” quoth Descartes.  Only that’s … so much effort…

Can I just am without thinking?  The verb to am -- I am you am he am she am …

-- David Lodge, Thinks… (2001), p. 4

The novelist’s here wrestling  with the innards of language, recalls the essay of Woody Allen, who, finding “I love you” too hackneyed, said to his paramour:  “I… loave you… I lerve you …”

Word of the Day: ”polygynopaedium”

In the initial, throat-clearing run-up to his massive 1975 masterwork, Sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson, in the section “The Kinds and Degrees of Sociality”, the author mentions W.M. Wheeler’s 1930 stab at classification, consisting of five types, rather dismissively, by contrast with the earlier (1918) system of Deegener, “who paid close attention to the fine details”, with 40 categories;  but then adds a linguistic or rather lexicographic caveat:

Unfortunately, Deegener felt compelled to provide a full terminology for his classification.  One form of concunnubium, he noted, is the amphoterosynhesmia, a swarm of both sexes  gathered for reproductive purposes … or the polygynopaedium,  an association of mother and daughters  each of which is reproducing parthenogenetically.

-- op. cit., p. 16)

Note:  However sesquipedalian those coinages may be, they are at least more self-explanatory [provided you are familiar with Greek and Latin roots] than e.g “Class II(a) and Class IV(b)”.  They are no more inherently outlandish than  deoxyribonucleic acid; successful such mouthfuls live on as acronyms, like DNA.

In any case, these categories are not nearly as obscure as their polysyllabicity might suggest -- both being exemplified  even within human societies, without so much as a nod  to baboon troops or termite hives.    An amphoterosynhesmia (I was personally familiar with several of these, in and around Berkeley) was precisely a hippie crash pad (the attention being however directed to reproductive preliminaries, rather than actually getting knocked up) or a Weatherman collective  during their period of obligate panmixia (for which see Susan Stern’s moving memoir).  And a polygynopaedium is the stated aim of The Rodwoman ©  and her coven of androphobic maenads.

Note:  Wilson himself seldom shies at the lexical rara avis or hapax legomenon.  A few pages after clucking his tongue at polygynopaedium, he writes of efforts “to define a niche as a Hutchinsonian hyperspace”  -- neither of those terms having been defined.  Your lexicographer might find that definition  a case of obscurum per obscurius.

Acrônym øf thè Däy: « äRTeäS »

In the staid banking capital of Zürich,  masked black bloc activists (anarchist APOisten)  ran wild last night.   As such, that is no concern of this blog;  but we shall notice some curious linguistic detail.

Die Randalierer trugen ein Banner mit der Aufschrift «Reclaim the Streets». In den vergangenen Jahren war es unter diesem Titel mehrmals zu erheblichen Sachbeschädigungen gekommen. Am Freitag nun riefen die Veranstalter im Laufe des Tages per SMS dazu auf, sich um 22 Uhr im Sihlhölzlipark in Zürich-Wiedikon zu treffen. In Aussicht gestellt wurde der «one & only dancefloor» unter dem Motto «äRTeäS», hinter dem sich das Akronym RTS für «Reclaim the Streets» versteckt.

http://www.nzz.ch/zuerich/randale-in-der-langstrasse-1.18443879

If you read about this in the anglophone press, you might assume that this slogan, «Reclaim the Streets»,  was a translation from the German, for the convenience of English-speakers.   Not so;  the following photo from Zurich last night, provides ocular proof:

Not only that, but the expression “black block” (or “black bloc”) has gone international.  A while ago (an Egyptian friend informed me) Angela Merkel apologized to Egypt for the “black block” anarchists there, who had imported a German ideology;  when I asked him, How did that come out in Arabic, he said:  “black block”.

Strangest of all, though, is this motto äRTeäS, within which the acronym RTS (for “Reclaim The Streets”) lies perdu in plain sight.   It looks like some new offbeat flavor offering from Häagen-Dazs, or perhaps a song by Mötley Crüe.   As for orthoëpic guidance, such as we commonly offer to our glottophilic flock, we are at a loss.  Conjecturally,  the word begins with a sort of vocalic sheep-bleat, and then the majuscularity of the following two consonants is signaled by pronouncing them at top volume while waving your arms (Monty Python has an instructive video along these lines), then back to a sheep-bleat, then back to the flapping.   Either that, or the vowels are silent.

[Note:  Just kidding.  If you simply pronounce the letters "R T S" in the German fashion, it comes out rather like ärteäs. ]

A polyglot German reader of the above article comments:

Ein gewalttätiger Anarcho-Fascho-Mob holt sich die gratis Party unter allesamt englischen Organisationskürzeln für eine "friday night" nach deren Gusto.

At all events, äRTeäS is but the latest acronymic/cryptographic contribution from the German-speaking world, to the contemporary lexicon of political street-protest.   Some others we have elucidated here:  

   HoGeSa, PeGiDa, and Dügida walk into a bar…

~

The signage of one of the vandalized shops (international anarchy strikes back  against the tyranny of the corner bakery!)  is an interesting anglo-alemannic mix:

Znüni ?  It’s Schwizerdütsch for what in general German would be Imbiß (etymologically: ‘in-bite’):  ‘snack’, or rather specifically a morning snack, since etymologically it means “a nine-o’clock-er” (from the Alemannic equivalents of zu + neun).

~

Was für Krimi liest wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?

Schauen Sie mal!

Sigmund Freud und Sherlock Holmes

~

[Update 14 December 2014]  Another aspect of German political movement names, foreign to the American way of naming, is its hospitality to Mundarten.  Thus, consider the following headlines from earlier this morning:

"Arsch huh" gegen rechte Gewalt - Künstler demonstrieren in Köln

http://www.rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/koeln/arsch-huh-gegen-rechte-gewalt-kuenstler-demonstrieren-in-koeln-aid-1.4738699

„Arsch huh“-Demo: Mit Karnevalisten und dem 1. FC Köln gegen Rechts

http://www.ksta.de/innenstadt/-arsch-huh--demo-mit-karnevalisten-und-dem-1--fc-koeln-gegen-rechts,15187556,29314086.html?piano_d=1

Um… say what?  They never taught us that in German class..

It’s the name of an anti-rightist movement in Cologne:  in full “Arsch huh, Zäng ussenander”; which, de.wikipedia  helpfully explains, is “Kölsch für Arsch hoch, Zähne auseinander”.   Umm … ‘Butt up, teeth apart’??  -- I still don’t get it.

The “rp” in rp-online stands for “Ripuarisch”, a northern dialect of German.  And indeed, Ripuarian has its own Wikipedia -- ksh.wikipedia.org  (“ksh” for “Kölsch”, after the principle regional city).   They explain:

Unger dämm Motto „Arsch huh, Zäng ussenander!“ hann sich em Johr 1992 kölsche Musikjruppe un Schauspiller, un e paa andere Künßler zesamme jeschlosse, öm jäje Fremdefeindlichkeit un Antisemitismus ze demonstriere.

The American language shows nothing comparable to such Mundarten.  Sure, Bostonians say “pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd” -- but they don’t have their own Wikipedia.

Factoid:   Continuing with our amusement at the proliferation of umlauts (which in the case of the icecream-company and the rock-band  are completely meaningless), let us note that one of the main backers of “Arsch huh”  is a Kölner rock-band called
“Bläck Fööss “ -- which means, however, ‘bare feet’.

And, another gnarly political acronym:   Gröfaz

~

Weiteres in re Confoederatio Helvetica :

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/05/bank-robbery.html

Acronym of the Day: HoGeSa

A word worth knowing:  HoGeSa (pronounced HO-gay-sah).  German for: 

    “Hooligans gegen Salafisten”

(hooligans against salafists).   And you say:  Wha- ? - ?

(1) Historical semantics

The word hooligan (possibly related to the Irish surname Hoolihan) was first attested in England in the late 19^th century, referring initially to Irish rowdies.   It carried no ideological connotation.

The word then took a very strange detour into Russian, as Хулига́н.  For the Soviets, it functioned as a sort of defanged continuation of the ever-useful term Lumpenproletariat, which dates back to Marx.  Again, for the Soviets, it denoted no clear political current, but was still -- class-analysis being paramount in Marxism -- more or less eingestuft into a class-struggle worldview:  Lumpen and hooligans being the dregs who, logically, should fight alongside the proletariat, but who instead engage in pointless criminality.  (The very phenomenon rather jarred with the neatness of Marxist analysis, which overestimates the purely economic.)

Later, in England, from the ‘70s on, it took on a particular coloring, being associated especially with soccer rowdies, who got quite a reputation on the Continent for acting up, and were banned from some countries.  For some reason, this phenomenon was much more characteristic of England than of any of the other soccer-mad nations of the world;  to elucidate that fact might prove quite revealing.

And now, in our own day, the word pops up  borrowed once again into a foreign language, this time German, and still with a particular association with soccer (or, in European terms, football).  Colloquial abbreviation:  die Hools.

Now:  What is quite interesting  is that this German term, Hooligans, is a self-designation, not an exogenous pejorative epithet.

But: Why would any group do that?

Well, this is not the place to delve into the psychology thereof, but it’s a plucky thing to do, and many groups have done it.  Thus, Quakers, Tories, etc. etc. : the defiant adoption by an outgroup of the ingroup’s trashtalk.   The most recent (and rather close) analogy is the word behind the “N” in NWA (which, as a non-N, I am not allowed to write out).

~

Lesen Sie die Geschichte  spesenfrei !

“Der Detektiv und das Mädlein”

~

(2) Morphology

For concision, I called HoGeSa an ‘acronym’, since that is a familiar word.  It is composed, though, not of initial letters, but of initial syllables. (A linguistic term for these is stump compounds.)

Again, there is a Soviet parallel.   This sort of logopoeic confection was completely characteristic of the Russian of the time, e.g. Komsomol (roughly: COMmunist /SOviet/MOLodyets (youth).)

Somewhat similarly, in German, among the opponents of the Hooligans (who are perceived as right-wing) are the Antifa  -- those who oppose what in French are called the fachos (fascists).
Most famously:  the GeStaPo (Geheime Staatspolizei). 

Contemporary bureaucratic German  is likewise given to such things.  Thus:  LaGeSo (Landesamt fuer Gesundheit und Soziales), a virtual/vocalic palindrome of HoGeSa.

For those of my generation (for you young’uns: i.e. :  Old!  Fagedabouddit !!), these syllabic abbreviations (as Wiki calls them) have a certain relent louche,  owing to their association with the whole Proletkult/Agitprop deviations of the Soviet era.  (Twenny-thirdy-fordy-somethings:  Any idea what I’m talking about?  Never mind.)  But they have much to their credit, over against “acronyms” in the narrow, initial-letter sense. 

At the time, the issue was pronounciability.  With strict-acronyms, you never know:  FBI (letter by letter) vs. NASA (like a word).  Whereas now, in addition to that (still valid), there is the matter of cross-linguistic searchability.

Thus, strict-acronyms are often translated (FMI vs IMF;  ADN vs. DNA), which makes online string-search  perilous.  But if you confect what is obviously a word -- yet a word in no obvious language -- everyone will let it be, like a proper-name (“Washington”; “Napoleon”), which no-one would dream of “translating”.

From this strictly philological standpoint, we salute the “Hooligans” for their coinage:  HoGeSa.

(Note:  Granted, as a vocable, as a hoagie-of-syllables,  it is not especially attrayant.   Cf. Gröfaz.  Ah well.)

Gratuit !

Lisez le conte entier

“Le détective et la fillette”

~

~

So much for the linguistics.  Now we get down to brass tacks.

Today in Cologne, roughly five thousand “Hooligans” answered the call to demonstrate, against the IS-leaning Islamist extremists known broadly as Salafists.  Whence:  HoGeSa.   This led to fairly violent street-confrontations.

This very significant public demonstration has so far scarcely been reported outside of Germany:  and when so, curly and dumbed-down, simply referring to “hooligans and neo-Nazis” battling police -- apparently for no reason.

To undumb you back up, consider this:

(1) Recently in the streets of Hamburg:  400 Kurdish demonstrators were attacked by 400 IS-supporters.

(2) A cri de coeur, from the Lower Depths:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DQEowo5XH8

Notice that the speaker invites moderate Muslims to join with them.

The speaker also seems to allude to recent beheadings in Germany.  Whether that happened, I have no idea;  if it did, it was hushed up.  But certainly it is in the offing:

German hostages of Salafists in the Phillipines

~ Sigmund Freud  und  Sherlock Holmes: ~

~ ~ Seelen-vertausch! ~ ~

(3)  Overview:

Rasantes Anwachsen der deutschen Salafisten-Szene

Die Behörden sehen sie als Sammelbecken für Kämpfer der Terrorgruppe Islamischer Staat und befürchten Stellvertreterkriege mit Kurden, Hooligans und Rechtsextremen.

http://www.nzz.ch/international/rasantes-anwachsen-der-deutschen-salafisten-szene-1.18411982

http://www.dw.de/german-domestic-intelligence-chief-warns-of-rapidly-growing-salafist-scene/a-18020976

The fact is, Germany has long been unwisely importing problems from abroad;  and now is too frightened to do anything about it.   Like the socialos in France,  the German authorities have been dithering;  it thus falls to the wretched of the earth, at last to roar in protest.

European background:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/10/word-of-day-psychosis.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2808395/Cabinet-chaos-immigration-one-minister-says-towns-swamped-EU-migrants-says-need-farm-jobs-Brits-refuse.html

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/08/rise-of-la-racaille.html

[Mise à jour, 28 oct 2014]
A parallel in Calais:
www.nzz.ch/international/ein-neonazi-profiliert-sich-1.18412750?extcid=Newsletter_28102014_Top-News_am_Morgen

[Update 9 December 2014]  And now HoGeSa is joined by two new syllabic acronyms: 

Pegida „patriotischen Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes“

Dügida, „Düsseldorfer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes“

Pronunciation of Pegida:  peh-GEE-da  (with hard "g" -- rhymes with "Uneeda").

http://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/pegida-duegida-und-hogesa-die-unerwuenschten-retter-des-abendlandes/11093158.html

Update 13 Dec 2014]  Good heavens, and now this:  äRTeäS  (sic).

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/12/acronym-of-day-arteas.html

[Update 14 Dec 2014]  Oof, and now this (of all things):

    "Arschhuh"

[Update 5 January 2015] The latest re Pegida, in English:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/world/europe/pegida-rally-dresden-germany.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

As one might expect, the New York Times turns itself into pretzels trying to minimize the march, referring instead, early in the article, to the much smaller pro-immigration march in the liberal stronghold of Berlin (a few hundred), while claiming that “No figures were immediately available for the turnout in Dresden”.   (Somehow, the BBC was able to get these, stating: “A record 18,000 people turned out” -- and this, despite a chilly rain.)

The Times interviews no-one from Pegida or, indeed, from average Germans, but recur to the usual anti-Pegida crowd: “On Monday, business leaders had joined the swelling chorus against Pegida”  (well, they would, wouldn’t they;  they want a cheap workforce, importing a Reserve Army of the Unemployed to keep the unions in line).

The Times describes Pegida as “murky” -- a purely rhetorical flourish”, and quotes this remarkable dismissal of the marchers:

“For my taste,” Mr. Schneider wrote in the newspaper Die Welt, “the crowd was too white.”

Also, far too German!

For much better coverage, from a mainstream German source, try this:

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/pegida-proteste-die-trotzigen-von-dresden-a-1011394.html

Another example of the lengths to which the bien-pensants will go, to sweep the popular upswell under the rug:

Pünktlich zum Beginn der Kögida-Demonstration um 18.30 Uhr wurde wie angekündigt die Außenbeleuchtung des Kölner Doms ausgeschaltet. Dompropst Norbert Feldhoff wollte verhindern, das eines der bekanntesten deutschen Wahrzeichen den Hintergrund der rechtspopulistischen Demonstration liefern würde.

http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article136047671/Bei-Koegida-lief-es-von-Anfang-an-nicht-rund.html

[Update Monday, 12 January 2015]  And now Legida:

In Leipzig stellten sich am Abend rund 30.000 Menschen dem Aufmarsch des Pegida-Ablegers Legida entgegen.

Likewise Kagida (Kassel), Cegida (Chemnitz).

[Update 8 March 2015]  Another HoGeSa demo in Cologne.  The march monitors wore police-style jackets labeled, amusingly,  "HOOLIZEI"  (i.e., Hooligan Polizei).

[Update 20 March 2015]  The German mania for APO-related syllabic acronyms  proceeds apace.  The latest is Blockupy : from Block (as in Black Block) plus Occupy (Wall Street).

Here they are exercising their right to free speech

They turned out to the numbers of roughly ten thousand, in the staid old banking capital of Frankfurt-am-Main, breaking and burning and sending a hundred cops to the hospital.   Nothing done by Hogesa or Pegida or Legida or any of that, approaches that level of violence, but the bien-pensant press is much more muted in criticizing Blockupy.

[Update 26 July 2015]  And now this ungainly confection:

EnDgAmE : engagierte Demokraten gegen die Amerikanisierung Europas

[Update 23 Sept 2015]
They haven't gone away:

Rund 5000 Menschen haben sich nach Polizeiangaben in Erfurt an einer Demonstration gegen die Asylpolitik von Bundes- und Landesregierung beteiligt. Sie zogen am Mittwoch durch das Zentrum der Thüringer Landeshauptstadt bis zum zentralen Platz der Stadt, dem Anger.

http://www.welt.de/regionales/thueringen/article146781556/5000-Menschen-bei-Demonstration-gegen-Asylpolitik.html#disqus_thread

A reader comments:

Bei PEGIDA waren letzten Montag in Dresden nach meiner Überschlags-Zählung auf dem youtube-Video mehr als 15.000 Menschen dabei (die Polizei gibt offenbar keine offiziellen Zahlen mehr heraus).

Warum herrscht darüber totale Stille im Blätterwald?

[Update 17 Oct 2015]  Wertvoll:
http://sciencefiles.org/2015/10/17/feindbild-weg-pegida-demonstranten-sind-keine-nazis/

[Update]  Bilan:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/world/europe/germany-migrants-refugees-pegida.html?_r=0