Space - luck for the German language
Extraterrestrial news floods the press
After weeks of promotional presentation, a balding small businessman (no, not the one with the high forehead implants) has come closer to his goal of making every DMM (dollar millionaire human) orbit the earth once: Captain Kirk is currently the oldest human being who did not directly feel the Earth's gravity. During the last giant bowl excursion, a young man and an old woman made history as the youngest and oldest participants, whose names no one remembers because they were not published. But who cares when the record numbers - that is, especially the sales figures - are tumbling.
90 years are now to be surpassed
Whereas 55 years ago William Shatner had heroically tucked his belly into every episode of the prematurely cancelled TV series, he filled out the blue jumpsuit magnificently, especially in the middle of his body. Besides the almost-actor, the boss himself has also been in the megabonbon. The reasons why he was not on board for the first trip to the Kármán Line may be speculated. When his visibly moved celebrity guest had solid ground under his feet again, he decanted a champagne bottle so that Shatner could not finish his speech - Possibly he would have said something less positive about the view of the Amazon otherwise.
Shortly before, another important public figure, whose name escapes me at the moment, had not been interrupted in her speech. Believe it or not, even in today's world, at least outside of German-language TV programmes with mainly political guests, there are still people who let others finish.
In a pedestrian interview (a website with the English-language name pedestrian), she was asked about her documentary series on the truth of UFO phenomena. In the process, the non-binary person with the surname Lovato had said - without being interrupted - that she found it racist and offensive when extraterrestrial beings are called 'aliens'.
What are aliens?
We are way ahead with our varied and wordy language. Not only because we use an anglicism to gender-expand every conceivable term to the point of unpronounceability (meaning 'gendering'), which does not even exist in the original English, neither for nouns nor prepositions. But also because aliens have always been called aliens and not aliens.
Sting already knew it
Unfortunately, Demi Lovato (29) was not yet born 34 years ago when Gordon Sumner CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) was already singing about the situation in October 1987: 'I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien, I'm an englishman in New York'.
Otherwise she might have known that 'alien' means nothing but 'stranger', which becomes a dilemma when dubbing English-language fantasy films. Because if you are born here on another planet, you are 'alien' for the inhabitants there and not 'extraterrestrial' - unless the extraterrestrials also call their planets Earth and communicate in English at all. However, we know from Star Trek that the green-, blue- or violet-painted ones orientate themselves by their sun and count the planets that don't have their own names, such as Riegel-7. In the franchise around Gene Roddenberry's legacy there are solutions: since 'human' or 'humanoid' applies to every actor in costume and make-up, they like to call us 'Terrans' or 'inhabitants of Sol-3'.
German language, difficult language
And then there is the matter of 'space'. When we say 'space', everything is fine. No one from this planet has ever been in space, but highest in world-space. Because not only the surface and the atmosphere, but also the moon orbits the earth, so it belongs to the 'world' around our planet. What Captain Kirk and Jeff Bezos experienced was not weightlessness, but just as underwater the effects of gravity are lessened by the friction of the fluid, the centrifugal force of Earth's gravity acts to keep the Moon in its orbit as well (well, almost, the Moon is gradually moving away as it is 'flung away' in cosmic dimensions). The parabolic flight to simulate weightlessness as an example: After a climb, the plane descends with the same acceleration as 'free fall'. The occupants perceive this as 'weightless' - and so the space capsule falls past the earth at the same speed as it is attracted.