The Economist USA - 28.03.2020

The EconomistMarch 28th 2020 Europe 47

I

n most languages, if someone said

you had cancer, it would be a diagnosis.

In Dutch, it is more likely to be an insult.

Kankerlijer(“cancer-sufferer”) is one of a

long list of Dutch profanities and explet-

ives derived from diseases. An undesir-

able person might be told to “typhus off”

(optyfussen) or “get consumption” (krijg

de tering). If in (American) English you

laugh your ass off, in Dutch you might

“laugh yourself the pleurisy” (lachen je de

pleuris). No one in England has been

called a “poxy bitch” for centuries, but in

the Netherlands you can still call some-

one apokkenteef. A damned long way is a

klereneind(“cholera-end”). And so on.

Because expletives are based on social

taboos, in most cultures they are linked

to sex, excrement or religion. Many

Dutch swear words are as well, but they

often feel weaker than the medical ones.

Schijtis less like its English cognate and

more like the gentler Frenchmerde.

Mierenneuker(“ant-fucker”) is an ano-

dyne expression for someone who fusses

over details. “Whore” is an insult in

Dutch too, but when the rapper Lil’

Kleine had a beef with pop singer Anouk

last autumn, he went with the harsher

kankerhoer(“cancer-whore”).

Scholars are not sure why the Dutch

swear with illnesses. One theory links it

to Calvinism, the puritanical strain of

Protestantism that caught on here in the

16th century, which holds that the virtue

of those destined for heaven will show

itself in worldly prosperity, health and

hygiene. “There was a shift in focus from

the afterlife to this life, which, for ex-

ample, diminished the strength of ‘God

damn it’,” says Marten van der Meulen, a

Dutch linguist and author of a book on

swearing. On this theory, “a curse might

be stronger if you used something in

actual life, like a disease.”

However, there is also what linguists

call the frequency hypothesis: the Dutch

may curse with diseases simply because

it caught on. Language, as Laurie An-

derson said, is a virus. Perhaps someday

Dutch kids will savage each other on the

playground with cries ofcoronalijer.

Dutch disease

Swearing

AMSTERDAM

A country where sicknesses are curses

I

t was shapingup to be a bumper year for

the Hotel Esplanade in Dortmund. On

February 13th its owners threw a big party

to celebrate a €2.5m ($2.7m) extension, and

to mark the moment that Katja Kortmann

took over as manager from her retiring fa-

ther. Two weeks later the cancellations be-

gan: first a trickle, then a tidal wave of up to

300 a day. On March 27th the Esplanade will

close its doors to guests and send its 40

staff home. The plan is to reopen on April

19th, but Ms Kortmann doubts that will

happen. “It’s just tragic,” she says.

Desperate times, desperate measures.

On March 25th Germany’s mps—sitting the

requisite two metres apart in the Bundes-

tag—backed an extraordinary set of poli-

cies designed to shield the country’s work-

ers and companies from the worst ravages

of the virus. Even sceptical observers have

been surprised by the government’s speed

and boldness. Its package, the most com-

prehensive in Europe, includes several ele-

ments, some of them dusted off from pre-

vious crises.

Chief among them is an expansion of

Kurzarbeit(short-time work), under which

the state pays 60-67% of the forgone wages

of workers whose hours are cut. The

scheme, copied across Europe, helped Ger-

many avoid mass lay-offs in 2008-09, but

Ms Kortmann’s experience shows how

things will differ this time. In the previous

crisis, notes Sebastian Dullien of the imk

research institute, manufacturers that

faced declining orders used Kurzarbeitto

reduce the hours of shift workers. Now the

scheme will have to bolster consumer-fac-

ing outfits whose customers evaporated

overnight. Almost all the Esplanade’s staff,

including Ms Kortmann, will be on zero

hours once the hotel shuts. The govern-

ment is planning for Kurzarbeitto extend to

2.15m workers—5% of those with jobs—at a

cost of €10bn for a year.

Larger firms can avail themselves of

€400bn in liquidity guarantees issued by a

new Economic Stabilisation Fund, mod-

elled on a bank bail-out fund from 2008.

Another €100bn may be reserved for direct

equity stakes in companies, including

“strategic” firms at risk of takeover, and the

same amount can be provided to the state

development bank, which Olaf Scholz, the

finance minister, has promised will lend in

unlimited quantities to troubled firms.

Germany’s 3m small companies and free-

lancers, meanwhile, can receive grants of

€9,000-15,000 to cover fixed costs like rent

as long as they can prove that they have

been hurt by the pandemic, which should

not be hard. Along with various other

measures the package amounts to a cool

€750bn (though the full sum is unlikely to

be used). Several German states are offer-

ing further help and Mr Scholz has hinted

at a separate post-crisis stimulus.

Germany has had to slaughter several

sacred cows to get here. The government’s

supplementary budget foresees borrowing

of €156bn this year, around 4% of gdp,

which means the hallowed schwarze Null

(“black zero”) no-deficit policy, in force

since 2014, is history. The Bundestag had to

invoke an emergency clause in the consti-

tutional debt brake, which normally limits

borrowing to 0.35% of gdp. A rotating cast

of international financial institutions has

long urged Germany to loosen its purse-

strings. It took covid-19 to do what the imf

and European Central Bank could not.

For now the measures will cushion the

worst of the blow. But for smaller firms

with thin cash reserves, the help will only

go so far. Alexander Zimmer, who runs the

Marienburg Monheim Manor, a conference

centre near Dusseldorf, is one example. His

workers will receive Kurzarbeitergeld, but

he will top it up to a full salary to make life

easier for them. He thinks he can do that for

three months at most.

At the European level there has been

some cross-border solidarity: several Ger-

man states have accepted patients from

overloaded French and Italian hospitals.

But the German government is unwilling to

heed requests to back jointly guaranteed

euro-zone debt (see Charlemagne). “If

we’re declaring war on the virus, euro-

bonds should be the instrument of choice,

but I’m not hopeful,” says Moritz Schular-

ick, an economics professor at the Univer-

sity of Bonn. The pandemic has changed a

lot in Germany. But not everything. 7

BERLIN

Germany spends big to combat the

corona crunch

Coronanomics

Money for all