This is a translation of a miscellaneous late fragment published in Volume 20 of the Gesammelte Schriften. If you spot any errors please let me know.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I read the word \u201cUromi<\/i>\u201d in a death announcement for a very elderly lady. Pausing, I initially thought that it was the name of an illness to which she had succumbed, some sort of uraemia. The defective orthography made me realise that it actually referred to something else. Uromi<\/i> was the great-grandmother [Urgro\u00dfmutter<\/i>]. They had extended by a generation the use of the idiomatic word for grandmother, \u201cOmi<\/i>\u201d. In the process she had become like some barbaric savage or an industrial advertisement, both equally gruesome, and hard to distinguish from each other. The word, which should have indicated something of closeness, became a grimace. They had wanted to standardise their intimacies, to which something embarrassing and repulsive always clings, especially when put in writing, and accosted the public with it, as though the deceased Omi<\/i> was the grandmother of the entire Volk<\/i>, because those mourners she left behind are like the millions who called her by that name. The effect goes head over heels. The infantile term of endearment becomes a mask for evil. Insofar as it evokes the incommunicability of the one it refers to, it rigidifies into a fetish. Love expressed as a formula, with its meaning alienated and relinquished, just like a corporate acronym, shamefully degrades the dead. The vain attempt to call her back to the dubious life of the family transforms her into something already dead during her lifetime. The Uromi<\/i> is a prehistoric monster. But at its most disconsolate: perhaps it was subjective good faith which put the Uromi<\/i> in the death notice. The spirit of a communicative language puts a blot on emotion; insofar as it lessens all distances, and in doing so damages reverence towards death, it leads deceitfully to a place where emotion, something alien to language, would like to be disclosed by the first best thing that comes to mind. Language fails in mourning because it has forgotten its shame.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
T. W. Adorno, 1967.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a translation of a miscellaneous late fragment published in Volume 20 of the Gesammelte Schriften. If you spot any errors please let me know.\u00a0 I read the word \u201cUromi\u201d in a death announcement for a very elderly lady. Pausing, I initially thought that it was the name of an illness to which she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_eb_attr":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-translations"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"yoast_head":"\n