as plain as or party on the patio

A colleague from work and I were discussing the curious case of the Jarhesendflügelfigur (the end of the year figure with wings) which was the official term for a Christmas angel during East German times, which tolerated decorations but tried to remove the religious connotations from the holidays. My colleague shared another term that vied for acceptance first among German linguistic purists in the 1800s (and saw a bit of a revival among other purists to come later) called Gesichtserker, a face-porch, meant to replace the German word Nase for nose—though the notion that Nase was a “foreign” word was a misconception and Erker, an oriel window, was in fact a loan word from the French arquière and this group of linguists wanted to eliminate such outside influences, like popularizing other awkward words like Stelldichein over rendezvous. Such a lexical shift never took hold. I found it really unbelievable and a bit apocryphal, like I am sure future generations will view episodes of the recent past of using words as ammunition, like freedom fries for French fries, over France’s (pommes frites are a Belgian invention) refusal to join in the Iraqi invasion.