exclusionary and antidemocratic

In Germany, we suffer under an annual media ritual in which a “jury” consisting of four linguists and a journalist select an “Unwort des Jahres” – an “Unword of the year” – to condemn as politically incorrect. The entire German press then reprint excerpts of the press release issued by these self-appointed language police, and the Gutmenschen can either pat themselves on the back for never have used that evil word in the first place, or strive like hell to keep it from their lips in the future.

As with many deeply retarded conventions, the Unword of the Yearbecame a thing after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1991 – as a “linguistically critical” campaign to lecture the masses about all the things they should not say. Its present guardians preach that “linguistic expressions become Unwords because they are used by speakers either thoughtlessly or with intentions worthy of criticism.” They furthermore hope that their “reflection and criticism on the use of Unwords” might “raise awareness about discriminatory, stigmatising, euphemistic, misleading or inhumane language usage.” That might sound all very transparently contentious, politically loaded and ridiculous to you, dear reader, but in Germany the Unwordians are experts and the media treat them like a minor lexicographical priesthood.

Let us go through a few past Unwords of the year, to gain an understanding for what our Unwordians get up to:

• In 2023, the Unword was “Remigration,” a term that came into currency as many who were not of the migrationist school began to wonder how the millions of hostile guests we’d heedlessly welcomed to our continent might be encouraged to go home. The Unwordians claimed that “remigration” had to be unworded because it had become “a right-wing battle cry” and “a euphemistic camouflage word … that obscures actual intentions.” I don’t know what that means; I’m pretty sure that people who talk about remigration just want migrants to remigrate.
• In 2022, the Unword was “Climate terrorists,” a term of art for the Letzte Generation lunatics who would not stop blocking traffic and defacing monuments in a strange campaign to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. The Unwordians argued that “climate terrorists” had to be unworded because “the term has been used in public discourse to discredit activists and their protests.” Heaven knows we wouldn’t to cast aspersions upon a bunch of crazy and disruptive social vandals in thrall to a pseudoscientific apocalyptic cult. That would be just terrible.
• In 2021, the Unword was “Pushback,” a borrowing from English that describes stopping irregular migrants at one’s border – in this case, the European border. “Pushback” had to be unworded, they said, because it “glosses over an inhumane procedure” that is intended to deny asylees their human right to claim asylum. Imagine the almost infinite chain of privileges the Unwordians conjure with this argument: Claiming asylum is a human right, so asylees must be allowed to cross borders to exercise their human right to claim asylum, and presumably they must be permitted all the prior actions necessary to bring them to these borders so that they may cross them and claim asylum.
• In 2020, for the first time in history, the Unwordians selected two Unwords of the year, one of which is not worth explaining, and the other of which was “Corona dictatorship.” This had to be unworded because it was used by “right-right extremist propagandists to discredit government policy measures to contain the pandemic.” The Unwordians complained specifically that “Corona dictatorship” was a term “used at demonstrations,” which they found to be a “contradiction” because said demonstrations, “unlike in authoritarian systems, are explicitly allowed.” I do not know what benighted outer moon of Jupiter the Unwordians can live on, such that they remained unaware of the fact that the Corona dictatorship did few things so systematically as banning demonstrations and arresting and beating up demonstrators.

On and on it goes like this. Over the years the, our speech police have produced a dubious catalogue of Unwords that reveal nothing so much as the emotional and political fragility of the Unwordians themselves. In 2019, the year of St. Greta, the Unword was “climate hysteria”; in 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, it was “alternative facts”; in 2015, the year Angela Merkel opened the borders, it was “Gutmensch.”

This brings us to the Unword of 2024, a particularly infuriating choice announced today by our unbiased and unpartisan Unwordian jury. It is biodeutsch, or “bio-German,” an adjective used to distinguish ethnic Germans from more recent arrivals.

From the decree of our Unwordians:

In 2024, the term biodeutsch was increasingly used in public and social discourse and especially in social media, to classify, evaluate and discriminate against people on the basis of supposedly biological criteria of origin … The term biodeutsch constructs a racist, biological form of nationality. Originally used ironically as a satirical term … for several years now a very thoughtless and unreflective, non-satirical and literally intended use has been observed for biodeutsch. In this way, ‘being German’ is justified via an appeal to nature for the purpose of demarcating and devaluing Germans with a migration background. Biodeutsch and the associated nouns … are in line with other words such as “passport German” and “authentic German,” which serve to ascribe unequal characteristics to groups of people who are equal before the law, thus classifying them hierarchically. This division into supposedly “real” Germans and second-class Germans that goes hand in hand with the use of biodeutsch is a form of everyday racism.

This is dumb for several reasons. First of all, “biodeutsch” does not “construct” a “biological form of nationality,” despite the bio- prefix. Linguists – even linguists as stupid and politically addled as the Unwordians – ought to know there is a powerful distinction between etymology and meaning. Second of all, as the Unwordians themselves reluctantly acknowledge, biodeutsch originated in leftist circles with ironic overtones that are too tiresome to describe. Later, it came to be used more seriously by those who asked why migrants require special designations (like “people of migrant background”) and why ethnic Germans should not be the ones singled out by marked and specific terminology.¹ Over a decade ago the Green politician Cem Özdemir – the son of Turkish immigrants – used the term repeatedly, and generally in a negative sense:

In the noughts, Cem Özdemir … appropriated the word. With it, the Green politician … threw down the gauntlet. There should be no distinction: Germans for whom this one word – “German” – is fully sufficient, and Germans who require an additional term, like “passport Germans” or “fellow citizens with a migration background.”

He countered this hidden linguistic devaluation by introducing biodeutsch. The biological German does not have two passports, is not bilingual, and does not deserve the unique selling point of being only “German” without any prefixes or suffixes. The trendy left then gladly adopted this in their self-deprecating pirouettes; the prefix “bio” signalled an awareness of their own limitations and privilege.

Because the distinction between ethnic Germans and non-ethnic Germans is very important (even if our present political religion insists that it does not exist); and because Özdemir was beyond accusations of racism, and furthermore precisely because he had christened biodeutsch as a specific ethnic pejorative – one intended to deny Germans the status of being simply German – Germans happily adopted the word for themselves. At least biodeutsch should be safe, they thought; at least biodeutsch would be a way to describe ethnicity, which is one of the most salient and important divisions in human populations next to gender.

Nothing, however, is safe from the left – particularly not the German left, and especially not when it comes to finding some way to describe or articulate Germanness. In the Anglophone world, “racism” is commonly understood to involve the (alleged) devaluation or dehumanisation of racial outgroups. Only recently and in the race-critical circles of particularly noxious radicals did the idea emerge that Europeanness itself (“whiteness”) is a false and racist concept worthy of abolition. The German left are altogether more eager to embrace this programme of aspirational self-annihilation by insisting the primary racist sin lies in believing that there are ethnic Germans at all, or at least in talking as if there were.

The Unwordians argue that the term biodeutsch has become “discriminatory” because “it violates the idea of democratic equality” and “excludes” non-ethnic Germans from the notional community of the Biodeutsche. We have achieved such an elaborated understanding of what “democratic equality” requires, that it is impossible to reconcile with everyday social realities. Perhaps if equality is to mean that we can’t even acknowledge or describe our own existence, we should strive to have a bit less of it. Or perhaps the Unwordians should try chasing down all the Turkish immigrants, the Chinese immigrants, the Syrian immigrants, and all the other immigrants who invariably maintain their own exclusionary ethnic identities long after receiving their German passports, and inform them that they, too, are guilty of undemocratic racism. That project is likely to turn out well.