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Lighthouse on Rügen: a »hotspot« in winter?
Photo: Jens Büttner / dpa
SPIEGEL:
Mr. Scharloth, Germany is currently experiencing the "flockdown".
You could also simply say: It's winter and it's snowing.
Why do we invent such words?
Joachim Scharloth:
People work a lot with images to describe a situation.
»Flockdown« transfers a term from epidemiology to the weather, combined with an easily understandable and now familiar request: Better to stay at home.
To person
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The linguist Joachim Scharloth, 49, holds a professorship for German Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Before that he taught at the TU Dresden.
One focus of his research is linguistic cultural analysis.
Among other things, Scharloth dealt with the language used by right-wing populists in Germany.
SPIEGEL:
The German Weather Service even refers to regions in which it snowed heavily as “hotspots”.
That’s wrong, not just in terms of temperature, right?
Scharloth:
I suspect that should charge physical matters emotionally, but "hotspot" is not suitable for snow.
There are more and more echoes of Corona in the weather reports: There is a lot of talk about "wave" and "situation", also about "protective measures".
But there is also the reverse effect: overviews of infection numbers are similar to familiar weather maps.
Red means an alarm.
SPIEGEL:
You examined how often certain words appear in reports in the German weather report.
What is your finding?
Scharloth:
Between 2014 and 2021, there was a sharp increase in terms borrowed from the semantics of war: "front" most often, but also "fight", "fight", "destroy" or "blow up".
SPIEGEL:
Our meteorologists would rather be war correspondents?
Scharloth:
War and combat are areas of vocabulary that we use in many areas.
For example in football: there is the "attack", the "storm", attackers "break through", the accurate striker used to be the "nation's bomber".
That doesn't have to be harmful now.
Usually it is about the headings of the weather reports, in the weather texts themselves the terms of war are less common.
"The weather has no intention, it is not hostile"
SPIEGEL:
What is the trend for?
Scharloth:
It's about dramatizing, attracting attention.
And then there is the tendency to personalize, to relate the weather to yourself as if to annoy you.
The highs and lows have been named for a long time, just as if they were an opponent or a friend.
The weather has no intention, it is not hostile.
SPIEGEL:
We actually believe that the weather has something to do with us?
Scharloth:
There is this idea from the climate discussion that we can influence the weather.
What is long-term is carried over to the daily weather.
In medicine, too, by the way, it is very similar: Someone then becomes a victim of an illness, or they are called upon to take up the personal fight against a disease such as cancer.
This sometimes blocks the view of real options for action with things that we can only control with difficulty in individual cases.
SPIEGEL:
How about the course of the corona pandemic?
Scharloth:
In contrast to the weather, we can at least influence the spread of a virus.
My impression is that politicians tend to avoid using war metaphors in connection with Corona.
At least that applies to the Chancellor, whose speeches I took a closer look at.
In Japan there is the term "winter general"
SPIEGEL:
You also did research on the vocabulary of the AfD and other right-wing populists.
Do they also like to play war rhetorically?
Scharloth: The metaphors of
illness dominate there, long before Corona: "cancerous ulcer", "tumor", "plague", "delusion", "paranoia", "neurosis", such terms from pathology can, for example, in connection with migration, become warring terms will.
There are also many »metastases« and »carcinomas« in the language of right-wing populists.
That is a vocabulary that I hoped would be behind us with the end of National Socialism.
SPIEGEL:
You live in Japan, a country that is more frequently affected by storms and floods.
How do the Japanese talk about the weather?
Scharloth:
Very factual, very routine.
There is the term "Fuyu Shogun" ("Winter General"), which describes cold air masses that come from Siberia.
The metaphor refers to Napoleon's Russian campaign.
Otherwise I haven't found much like that.
The top priority in Japan, also for meteorologists, is: Don't panic!
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