Today’s word of the day, courtesy of Merriam-Webster, is Weltanschauung. It is pronounced /ˈvɛltˌɑnˌʃaʊ ʊŋ/ (that is the International Phonetic Alphabet, and you can learn more about it at https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/) or “velt-ahn-shou-oong” (a phonetic respelling) (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/Weltanschauung). It means “worldview” (ibid.). Merriam-Webster goes further: “A Weltanschauung is a worldview; in other words, a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world especially from a specific standpoint. The word is typically capitalized” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day).

This German word “combines Welt, meaning ‘world,’ with Anschauung, meaning ‘view.’ When English speakers first adopted Weltanschauung in the mid-19th century, it referred to a philosophical view or apprehension of the universe, and this sense is still the most widely used. It can also describe a more general ideology or philosophy of life. Note that the word is typically capitalized in English, as all nouns are in German” (ibid.). Etymonline is more precise, saying that the word was introduced into the language in 1868 by the philosopher William James (https://www.etymonline.com/word/weltanschauung). Apparently, he included the word in a letter, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (https://www.oed.com/dictionary/weltanschauung_n?tab=factsheet#14616115).

So just to clarify a few things. Weltanschauung is now considered a borrowing rather than a foreign word, so it is not italicized, although it is usually capitalized as if it were a German noun (all nouns in German are capitalized, whether proper or not, wherever they are in a sentence). The W is pronounced like the English v; so the composer Richard Wagner’s name is pronounced like it is spelled Vagner.

When I was in graduate school, working on my master’s and then my doctorate, people often used the word Weltanschauung instead of the world worldview, which is a lot easier to say but does not sound nearly as erudite. It was sort of implied that the German word was somehow more philosophical, more intellectual, deeper than the simple English word. I suspect that that is not true, but I do have to say that it is a lot more fun to use the German word at a cocktail party.

I’m sitting in front of the television today, watching the 1938 film version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, in her debut.

Eliza Doolittle was inspired by the owner of a flower stall, Kitty Wilson. Professor Higgins may have had several inspirations, but the most notable perhaps was Professor Henry Sweet (1845-1912. Sweet was a philologist who specialized in in Germanic languages. He published A Handbook of Phonetics in 1877 and A Primer of Spoken English in 1890, “the first scientific description of educated London speech, later known as received pronunciation, with specimens of connected speech represented in phonetic script” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Sweet). “In addition, he developed a version of shorthand called Current Shorthand, which had both orthographic and phonetic modes. His emphasis on spoken language and phonetics made him a pioneer in language teaching, a subject which he covered in detail in The Practical Study of Languages (1899). In 1901, Sweet was made reader in phonetics at Oxford. The Sounds of English (1908) was his last book on English pronunciation” (ibid.). Despite his work and his brilliance, he never was made a professor at Oxford in large part because he was blunt—people had a hard time with him. If you’re familiar with Pygmalion, you see the similarity.

One of the most popular characters from the play, and from the musical version of it called My Fair Lady, is Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s father. He is introduced in Act 2, after Eliza has gone to Higgins’s house for lessons, so that she can talk like a lady. Doolittle enters with an obvious plan to blackmail Higgins, but it doesn’t work because Higgins can’t be blackmailed. Colonel Pickering says to Doolittle,

31

PICKERING. Have you no morals, man?
DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Can’t afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me. Not that I mean any harm, you know. But if Liza is going to have a bit out of this, why not me too?

Further down in the scene, Doolittle explains, “I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: “You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.” But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I’m playing straight with you. I ain’t pretending to be deserving. I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth. Will you take advantage of a man’s nature to do him out of the price of his own daughter what he’s brought up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his brow until she’s growed big enough to be interesting to you two gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable?” (https://classictheatre.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Pygmalion-script.pdf).

Later in the play, a transformed Doolittle reappears, on his way to get married, marriage being an unhappy consequence of his having joined the middle class. He explains to Higgins that Higgins’s letter to an American philanthropist, Ezra D. Wannafeller, has done him in. He says, “he leaves me a share in his Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that I lecture for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they ask me up to six times a year” (ibid.). And he complains to Higgins, “It’s making a gentleman of me that I object to. Who asked him to make a gentleman of me? I was happy. I was free” (ibid.).

This notion of the underserving poor is meant to be comic, but one can see how it is just a different worldview, a different Weltanschauung.

The image todays is “A Sketch Magazine illustration of Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle from 22 April 1914. Shaw wrote the part of Eliza expressly for Campbell, who played opposite Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Henry Higgins” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(play).