Is "Blitzkrieg" a word that average native speaker would understand? [closed]
The word "Blitzkrieg" (German: “lightning war”) comes from a method of warfare used during World War II.
- Can the word "Blitzkrieg" be used in other contexts as well? For example: "Blitzkrieg approach to write code"
- Would the meaning described in (1) be understandable for an average native speaker?
Solution 1:
In English blitzkrieg is also informally used to refer more generally to a blitz. I think, contextwise, the term would be intuitively understood.
A blitzkrieg is a fast and intense military attack that takes the enemy by surprise and is intended to achieve a very quick victory.
Journalists sometimes refer to a rapid and powerful attack or campaign in, for example, sport, politics, or advertising as a blitzkrieg. [informal] ...a blitzkrieg of media hype.
(Collins Dictionary)
A few usage examples:
From Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line By Michael Gibney - 2014
A blitzkrieg of tickets has piled up, two dozen tables—at least.This is where the hammer comes down. “Fun don't stop, boys,” Chef says. He reads off another ticket.
From Too Late.: How we lost the battle with climate change by Geoffrey Maslen - 2017
Earlier, human hunter-gatherers created what biologists call a 'blitzkrieg of extinctions' that killed off all the megafauna...
From A Decade of Delusions: From Speculative Contagion to the Great Recession By Frank K. Martin - 2011
The unintended side effect was a blitzkrieg of dubious, and sometimes extreme, financial innovations that became dangerously complex and interdependent.
Solution 2:
As a native speaker myself, yes - I would say I do understand the term Blitzkrieg.
Without looking at your definition, off the top of my head, I would consider it to be a relentless or quick-paced approach.
Solution 3:
For the title question, "is 'blitzkrieg' understood by the average native speaker?", there are several ways to address this. One can rely on the introspection and experience of language experts (not just lexicographers but secondary school teachers and professional writers). My expectation of what they would say is that 'blitzkrieg' is most widely known as a historical term learned when studying WWII in high school (in both US and UK). In that, students are universally exposed to the word. However, many vocabulary items that one is exposed to are often lost without repetition. I'd guess that most college educated Americans would vaguely recognize it as something maybe having to do with WWII and maybe speed. The word 'blitz' is more well known (a football term for a fast attack); 'krieg' is not a recognizable word by itself, so the mental state upon hearing 'blitzkrieg' gets most of its feeling from 'blitz'.
But that is a qualitative explanation which only depends on your trust of my assessment.
A more quantitative result can be extracted from frequency counts of the appearance of the word. One can take frequency as a proxy for population understanding. If a word appears frequently, one can infer that more writers expect that the reader will understand it. Of course there are no guarantees and one is relying on are large number of instances of all words and of the target word to be sure.
Google NGrams is one source of frequency data.
Google NGrams gives a big spike during WWII (0.0000500%) but then falls pretty quickly to bouncing around a third of the frequency all the way up to now. This rough frequency (0.0000150%) falls around the OED's Band 5 or 4 similar in frequency to words like 'galvanize', 'surreptitiously', 'Jungian', 'egregious', 'sequester'. It's not a perfect measure but it is in the ballpark.
Note that any corpus may have difficulties and Google NGram's are well known. But the data is trustworthy enough to say something vague like 'most people with a college education, with context, would understand what is meant, but not necessarily remember the history behind it'.
As to whether the word can be used figuratively and be understood, sure but it all depends on the construction of the sentence and context. For example 'scrum' is a well known word in software but the general American public unfamiliar with rugby may not get it at all.
Blitzkrieg approach for gettings things code.
is not a full natural English sentence so it by itself may be puzzling to a native speaker for many reasons and so it would be hard to gauge if the first word is the cause of that or something else. A more natural composition using those same elements would be:
We're using a blitzkrieg approach for coding things up.
Note also that I've been using the uncapitalized version 'blitzkrieg'. In German, a noun is always capitalized 'Blitzkrieg' but that is not the case in English orthography. In any case, the NGrams are almost the same shape for both.
Solution 4:
It would be lowercase “blitzkrieg”. Older people will understand it, anyone under 20 or 30 is welcome to comment. Often abbreviated as “blitz”. “To blitz” is also used as a term for turning all kinds of vegetables or fruit into juice with a very strong blender, that usage is relatively new. And it has been used for years as a term for a very fast chess game under extreme time limits.
It’s not a word I’d recommend you to use outside of discussing war strategies.
Solution 5:
To answer point 2 of your original question—I'm a software engineer and "Blitzkrieg approach to writing code" sounds a bit odd to me. As user 66974 said, blitzkrieg is often used colloquially to mean a "rapid and powerful attack or campaign"—in other words, it tends to be used in contexts where the such military metaphors as "attack" and "campaign" are also used. Those contexts include advertising, politics, and sports, but not writing code.
As an aside, in chess I've heard both "blitz" and "blitzkrieg" used but to the best of my knowledge they are not interchangeable in English chess jargon. Blitz means chess with tight time limits (often each side only gets five minutes for the entire game). Meanwhile "blitzkrieg" is another term for the scholar's mate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholar%27s_mate