The German language assigns one of three gender-specific definite articles - together with their matching pronouns - to every object under the sun, as well as to die Sonne itself.
Sitting down to a simple breakfast in immediate-post-war Germany, in front of me was der Teller (masculine), das Messer (neuter), die Tasse (feminine), der Löffel (masculine), der Käse (masculine), and das Brot (neuter). Confusing enough but it got worse when I drank from der Tasse (masculine) or put den Käse on den Teller because German uses those declensions of which Mark Twain wrote, "I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective." (from "A Tramp Abroad")
Imagine my pleasant surprise when years later I ended up in Australia and found that everything was neuter, except Her Majesty the Queen, and all persons in general, and, yes, the famous "She'll be right, mate!"
Or should that now be "They'll be right, mate!", because I've heard that schoolteachers are instructed to drop the personal pronouns "he" and "she", just in case one of their students, while not even having reached puberty, may have reached the conclusion that "they" are lesbian, gay, non-binary, bisexual, transgender, pansexual, or any other combination of the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ alphabet (I asked for a full explanation of this unpronounceable acronym but have yet to get a straight answer).
I feel a little left behind the times, as I arrived in Australia in 1965 when being gay simply meant being happy; when Golden Gaytime icecream had not yet become 'offensive' to the LGBT community; and bearded competitors had not yet shown up in the ranks of female weightlifters.
I felt even more left behind the times when recently I discovered on the facebook page of my hometown Braunschweig the above photo of half a dozen girls from the 1950s. Innocently commenting on their demurely buttoned-up blouses and pleated skirts with "Ja, so nett sahen die Mädchen damals noch aus" - which, as Google Translate is my witness, means nothing more than "Yes, the girls looked so nice back then" - I was dumped on from a great height by a bunch of feminists who insisted that "Nett aussehen sollte niemals das Ziel von Mädchen oder Frauen sein." ("Looking nice should never be the goal of any girl or woman.")
Watching the above video clip, in which my favourite author Douglas Murray in measured tone wards off the shrill attacks by someone who "ticks all the boxes" - female, black, and perhaps even belonging to one of the letters in the alphabet of the unpronounceable acronym - I have only just now woken up to the meaning of "woke". How unwoke is that?
While the West exhausts itself in political correctness, fighting culture wars and racial wars and gender wars, and living lives so easy that it has to invent problems, the barbarians outside the gate are already girding up for the real war to come. Oswald Spengler was definitely right!
