My favourite German word

Summary

My favourite German word 30th June 2025 A documentation colleague recently challenged me with a question: Nowadays, more and more people reach for an LLM tool to provide the information they want. If human beings don’t actually read it, what is the point of writing and structuring documentation for humans? Newer generations (she said) are becoming unskilled at finding information for themselves. They seem less able to digest what they find, to apply it to their problems. But it’s not just that: everybody seems to expect answers that are closely tailored to their particular situation, level of understanding and so on, and to get the answers now. And, many of them are willing to give up guarantees of quality and reliability in exchange of ease-of-use and customised responses. So why should we take painstaking care in the creation of high-quality documentation? A lot of recent discussion in documentation circles and forums has swirled uneasily around these topics. A popular and gloomy version of my colleague’s line of thought is: “What is the point of my job?” Good question. Gegenstand My favourite word in the German language is Gegenstand, for object or thing. Gegenstand, “stand-against”. An object is something that stands against you. It’s not you. It’s outside you. It has its own rules. It doesn’t conform to your desires. You run up against it, and it resists. Objects aren’t just inert stuff – they do something. Even better, Gegenstand shows how objects help define us. I know what I am, what the limits of myself are, because I am able to come up against resistant objects. That’s how I know and have a sense of my own body, its extension in space, where it ends and where the world begins. I am able to have a self in the first place only because the world of objects is there to stand against me. The nature of things Gegenstand gives objects and reality a kind of integrity. I have to respect them. They do not yield to my will just because I want them to. They have a nat...