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Comment by _ak | Hacker News Reader

"To the German authorities it was officially known as the Grenzhochspannungshindernis ("High Voltage Frontier Barrier")."

How German. And by that I don't just mean that it's a long word per se, but also the bureaucratic, almost euphemistic, but also overly precise wording. Informally, people would simply call this an "Elektrozaun" (electric fence).

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Bureaucratic German is very ... special. In cases like this one, it is cynical in covering up or disregarding human suffering and death. As Thomas Pynchon says, "a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it".

In some cases, Bureaucratese can be quite funny (but never intentionally), and mocking it can be very enjoyable. At work, we call our trouble ticket system the "Störungsmeldevorrichtung". ;-)

If you want to do the proper way, call it "StöMeVo".

And only use the abbreviation, never call it "Störungsmeldevorrichtung" so people will forget what it stands for.

There's a general tendency to treat large-scale violence and force in bureaucratic language. Nobody would call a bunch of thugs who ride into a village and murder all the people they don't like something other than a bunch of murderers. But once they claim authority and do it in large numbers or in a somewhat legitimized ("legitimization by procedure") way, those murders are being called 'executions' like in the area under control of the IS.

To be fair, extraordinary rendition has some striking similarities with Sonderbehandlung (though the latter was even more sinister).

If elected I promise to hire Hugo Boss to do the new Homeland Security uniforms.

This is why I love the German language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_words#German

For its associations with bureaucracy and death?

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