The fight to be the leading newspaper in Berlin is a ferocious one, so when executives at the Berliner Morgenpost sat down recently to dream up a new advertising slogan, they thought long and hard.
German words are just too long.
That may seem an unjust accusation to level at Einfach besser, but it is true that if precision is a hallmark of the German vocabulary, brevity is not. In any event, the issue is clearly a broader one, for the English encroachment on Deutsch has assumed epic proportions, giving rise to a form of speech widely known as Denglisch. It has even given rise to jibes from commentators in France. It is true that the intrusion of English into the German language is reaching avalanche proportions, to the point where a student of Hochdeutsch has to perform mental gymnastics and can have difficulty following a conversation where sentences are cluttered with English words and expressions. Of course, advertising is driving the influx of English words.