I recently read Bastian Sick's Der Dativ ist dem Genetiv sein Tod. It is good reading for those moments when you have short blocks of time - like on the stinker or in the bus. Even for a non-native speaker of German, it helps sharpen the reader's ear for faulty or inaccurate or unusual use of German. Some of it was familiar to me already - for example the use of the dative case instead of genetive, as referred to in the title (almost epidemic here in the Laendle), and the silly Americanisms creeping in all over, even when they are not accurate reflections of how Americans actually use the words being imported (Handy and just for fun being standard examples).

The book's effect really hit home over the past several days, however, as I began noticing examples from the book in real time. One chapter of the book is about the rampant use of -weise words as adjectives. Sure enough, on Monday night I heard a lecture in which the speaker mentioned a teilweise Detabuisierung (which, come to think of it, is also an example of the proliferation of -ierung nouns at the expense of verbs, another chapter in Sick's book). Then, yesterday, I heard someone on the radio say that some proposal was the optimalste Lösung to a problem. Ha! "optimal" is already as good as it gets. You can't make it into a superlative, or even a comparative for that matter. Either something is optimal or it isn't. Then, only a few minutes later, someone said, das muesste man sich realisieren and it was not in the context of verwirklichen or finishing, making real. It was meant just like Sick says - in the American sense of "realize" (sich bewusst machen, jmdm. bewusst werden). Sick hadn't warned me, however, that Germans were not only importing this English word, but were making it reflexive to boot. Das hatte mir wirklich gar nicht realisiert!