usmbguest5318
Gold Member
I'm sorry, but I don't know what to make of your comments. I don't because your first paragraph makes the point that terms have meaning that has nothing to do with whether one applies or accepts that meaning.
Then, in the next paragraph, you contradict that very idea.
Now, I don't speak German, so maybe that's why it doesn't make sense to me that "Nazi" be a short form of "National" and not a short form of "Nationalsozialistische," which seems, even as non-speaker of German, to quite clearly indicate both "national" and "socialist." It seems to me the "na" is the shorthand for "national" and the "zi" is the shorthand for socialist. "Nationalsozialistische" doesn't really lose anything in the translation to English; there's a reason "National-Socialist" is hyphenated, that is to say, meaning is connected to the fact that it is. (See also/instead: What Is a Compound Adjective? Definition & Examples) Essentially, the meaing is that "National-Socialist" is the same thing in English as "Nationalsozialistische" in German, and every other way of combining those two words is not.
(Can I tell when someone does indeed mean "National-Socialist," rather than some other combination of that term, and thus has mispunctuated their writing? Only when they write enough that the context of what they mean becomes clear, no matter the words they write or punctuation they use or don't. When they don't write enough, their meaning is ambiguous. Make of that what you will, but the fact is that I've never learned how to read minds, but I have learned how to read what folks write.)
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