Pflicht

Growing up semi-bilingual - my German never actually reached the level of my English - I learned early on that certain words are difficult to translate. You can get the general idea, the denotation, across. But the connotations often don't survive the transfer. The expression "lost in translation" is not an idle notion.

In later years, after I had spent years in Japan and acquired a better than entry-level familiarity with the Japanese language, I added other untranslatables to the pile. "Ikenai" - literally "that doesn't go" - for example. Mothers say that all the time to their kids. A translation that gets a little closer to the Japanese might be "People don't do that!" In Japan - at least in the Japan I first got to know half a century ago - the importance of not looking bad in the eyes of your neighbors carried a hell of a lot more weight than it did in other places I had spent any length of time. I might even make an argument that when a mother says "ikenai" to her kids, what she's actually saying is "don't you dare embarrass me in the eyes of everybody we know."

"Komaru" is another of those words. In my head, I hear "I am having a hard time with this." It's a verb with a very broad semantic range. It covers everything from distressed to troubled to inconvenienced to embarrassed and at a loss. When it's time to harness the dogs for a walk, and they fail to line up fast enough to satisfy my Japanese husband's sense of proper dog behavior, he scolds them with "Komaru yo!" (I am "komaru!")

From my German grandmother, I learned such concepts as "Ordnung" - "order" - as in "Ordnung muss sein!" - "there must be order."  I once heard her describe the bedrooms of my sister and me as "Sodom and Gomorrah." She liked things to be in their proper place. Another German concept was "Disziplin" - discipline. As in, "if you haven't got it, you're of no use to anybody, including yourself!"

And my grandmother came immediately to mind when I saw this sign the other day,

English: STOP! From here on, the wearing of a mouth-and-nose covering is a DUTY (sic - all caps)!

Modern Germans, like modern Americans, are more likely to respond to carrots than to sticks, so it's now not unlikely you'll see this sign instead:

Same icon with face mask, only this time the imperative is a polite one. Note the use of "thank you." (And, of course, the presence of an English translation suggests the people posting the sign are addressing an international audience. And that begs the question of whether the first one, in German only, comes from a mindset that assumes when one shouts "Achtung!" everyone within hearing will jump immediately to attention.

In any case, the first one reminds me of my grandmother. There's no "please," no "thank you." 

There's simply that wonderful German word "Pflicht" - "duty".

One can almost hear the second part of that command:

"Violators will be shot!"

She was a loving lady, not militarily inclined in the least. But she was a native speaker of the German language, and imprinted on me not just a lot of everyday German vocabulary items, but a whole bunch of unspoken connotations, as well.