Any credit I got last week for coining a term on Twitter was quite undeserved. The Ukrainians who did need Germany to do more
A couple of weeks ago, at a moment of huge frustration over Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s foot-dragging on allowing Europe’s German-made Leopard tanks to go to Ukraine, a Ukrainian friend WhatsApped me a satirical mockup on “Scholzing”. Next to a photograph of the chancellor, it defined Scholzing, dictionary-style, as: “verb: communicating good intentions only to use/find/invent any reason imaginable to delay these and/or prevent them from happening”. I found this sharp and amusing, quickly retweeted it, and thought no more about it. My Twitter account seemed to be buzzing, but then I’d been writing a lot about the issue myself.
Six days later, I was watching an interview with Scholz on Germany’s ZDF television channel when the interviewer confronted him with “Scholzing”, attributing the coinage to “a British historian”. I went back to my Twitter feed to find that this one quick tweet had been viewed 1.1m times. In German and international media, the definition was being widely quoted as mine. Since, as we all know, the internet never lies, it has now become a historical fact that I thus defined “Scholzing”. (I had incautiously tweeted the meme directly from WhatsApp, so it didn’t show up as something sent from Ukraine. I subsequently clarified this on Twitter, but of course no one reads the clarification.)
