Column grandstand – language games | The country messenger

Bernard Thurnheer

Posted today at 3:40 pm—

“When I got into television, it began to rise. Now that I have retired, his decline has started. ” This statement is absolutely correct. However, the two things have nothing to do with each other. It is a coincidental time coincidence. However, the sentence suggests something else.

“I wouldn’t have a chance against Roger Federer in the hall.” This sentence is also completely correct. Its relative significance is, however, much easier to see through than that of the first. Therefore, he will have conjured up a smile rather than another frown on your face. The fact that I would have a chance in tennis against Federer in the open air, on sand or grass, as is suggested, is completely nonsense.

A process that is constantly changing everything

Over 2500 years ago philosophers played with relish with language. Heraclitus of Ephesus (he lived from around 520 to 460 BC), formulated the beautiful sentence: “You never step into the same river twice.” In doing so, he puzzled most of the people who see the river as a waterway from the source to the mouth. Heraclitus, however, meant flow in the sense of movement, in the sense of a process that constantly changes everything. So he brought his thought “everything flows – panta rhei” among the people.

Confucius (551–479 BC) taught that only two things were needed for a good coexistence, humanity and tradition as a common basis. Traditions would have to be questioned again and again, as they would be falsified over time, reinterpreted using language. So there was fake news more than 2500 years ago!

“In a herd of black sheep, the white sheep is the black sheep.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) finally found out that words can mean something completely different depending on the context. A game could be, for example, a card game, a mind game, the game of a loose screw, etc. When we talked, we played some kind of chess. Let the words be the pieces, the grammatical rules the rules of chess, our statements the moves.

Playing with language is something extremely enjoyable if you don’t use it to ideologize and manipulate people, but just to make them smile. In the course of my forty-year football reporting career, I’ve also juggled words from time to time. And since I still have a few lines left: “In a herd of black sheep, the white sheep is the black sheep.” “Thun striker Adriano has two role models: Kaka from Milan and Jesus from Nazareth.” “The players complain, but that’s referee curry sausage.”