"Anglicize." That’s our word for taking something from a foreign language and making it our own. Buried under reasonably obscure etymology as it is, it’s a pretty clinical word.

The German counterpart – eindeutschen – is much cooler. Because the etymology is so transparent it’s not even etymology. ein just means in,into, and deutsch is obviously "German," – but since Deutsch is properly a noun or adjective, you have to throw some verbal morphology (en) on the end to make the whole thing a verb.

Bonus: it’s a separable prefix verb – so ja, the past participle is eingedeutscht – with the cool ge infix and everything.

Point being – everyone knows exactly how it formed, and exactly what it means. If it didn’t exist, every native German speaker would independently invent it.

I bring this up because in all the brouhaha about over Scott Alexander’s latest rant on feminism I stumbled across one of the cooler examples of ein-deutsch-ing I’ve seen in a while.

It comes from the second comment on this post at Meinungen und Deinungen:

Naja, kann mir auch egal sein. In sieben Jahren ist 2022, und die können gerne Soylent Green essen, während sie empauerte ignorante Feministinnen als “starke Frauen” feiern, so tun, als wären alle pari inter pares und auf Soma Solidary Service feiern. (TRANS: Anyway, I could care less. In 7 years it’s 2022, and (for all I care) people can eat Soylent Green while celebrating empowered, ignorant Feminists as "strong women," act as though we’re all pari inter pares in Soma Solidarity Services.)

Did you catch it? empauert has been eingedeutscht! No, that’s not a German word – not a native one anyway. What cracks me up is that he doesn’t even spell it in English. It isn’t "empowered ignorante Feministinnen" – as it well could have been. Nope. It’s "empauerte ignorante Feministinnen" – completely with adjectival agreement marking (the e on the end) and everything. AWESOME.