My favourite German word¶
30th June 2025
A documentation colleague recently challenged me with a question:
Nowadays, more and more people reach for an LLM tool to provide the information they want. If human beings don’t actually read it, what is the point of writing and structuring documentation for humans?
Newer generations (she said) are becoming unskilled at finding information for themselves. They seem less able to digest what they find, to apply it to their problems. But it’s not just that: everybody seems to expect answers that are closely tailored to their particular situation, level of understanding and so on, and to get the answers now. And, many of them are willing to give up guarantees of quality and reliability in exchange of ease-of-use and customised responses.
So why should we take painstaking care in the creation of high-quality documentation?
A lot of recent discussion in documentation circles and forums has swirled uneasily around these topics. A popular and gloomy version of my colleague’s line of thought is: “What is the point of my job?”
Good question.
Gegenstand¶ My favourite word in the German language is Gegenstand, for object or thing. I like it because it makes objectivity an active principle. Gegenstand, “stand-against”. An object is something that stands against you. It’s not you. It’s outside you. It has its own rules. It doesn’t conform to your desires. You run up against it, and it resists. Objects aren’t just inert stuff – they do something. Even better, Gegenstand shows how objects help define us. I know what I am, what the limits of myself are, because I am able to come up against resistant objects. That’s how I know and have a sense of my own body, its extension in space, where it ends and where the world begins. I am able to have a self in the first place only because the world of objects is there to stand against me. The nature of things¶ Gegenstand gives objects and reality a kind of integrity. I have to respect them. They do not yield to my will just because I want them to. They have a nature that belongs to them. If I want to do something with them, I’m going to have to work on their terms to do it. A lever is a lever because it resists. Reality’s resistance is what makes it possible to work with things at all. Every tool and machine that ever existed worked by being a stubbornly resistant Gegenstand. Shared reality¶ A Gegenstand is an object for me - an object of my experience. But objects are objects for everyone. They are there to stand against everybody. It’s not just that we have a shared experience of objects – our experience and knowledge of each other is also only possible because we inhabit a world of shared objects to stand against. Design, fit and resistance¶ Good design is magnificent because it takes resistant materials, unyielding constraints, and successfully gives them a form that works for us. It’s a pleasure to pick up something – a knife, a camera, anything – that simultaneously fits and resists the hand, in just the right ways. Good clothes fit and resist the body. The pleasure is not just in the fitting, but in the fitting and resistance. Bad design¶ Something that resists unpleasantly, like an uncomfortable chair, is bad design. It only resists, and fails to fit. (We have enough of those things in our lives.) But, bad design is also when things are made to fit too much. In the 1980s, a strange thing started to happen to physical products, and continues today. The idea that objects should fit to human needs began to be interpreted as meaning that they should literally fit the shape of the hand. Parts of everyday products – on bicycles, umbrellas, cameras – were increasingly given hand-shaped grips. A camera today will often have a grip closely contoured to the fingers of the hand. In one way this does make the camera easier to hold – but literally only in one way. Only with the right hand, and only in one particular way, so tough luck if that doesn’t suit you – for example if you have a physical disability. Holding it any other way (and there are many good ways of holding a camera) is made more difficult, unsafe and uncomfortable. (Similarly, the asymmetric computer mice that became popular a couple of decades ago were as unpleasant in the left hand as a shoe on the wrong foot.) These objects are over-fitted. Servile objects¶ Our hands, that evolved over millions of years, can hold almost any suitably-sized object safely and comfortably. Things don’t need to be specially fitted to the hand; our hands are happy to meet and hold anything that doesn’t actively resist them. In fact, they don’t want objects to be over-fitted. Over-fitted objects are servile. They have a creepy character. They are craven and eager to please, and give up their own confidence of form, that would allow us, with our splendidly adaptive hands, to hold them in multiple different ways. Their design doesn’t actually help us. It looks like the object has been designed to fit to the needs of the hand, but in fact it’s a false friend – it’s the hand that is obliged to conform to the object’s single idea of how it should be held.
People¶ The same principles apply to our relationships with people. People must be Gegenstände, who stand against you because they have their own integrity, and do not conform to what you want just because you want it. A friend is a person who fits and resists in the right way, someone you can stand against to measure yourself by them. A friend is not someone who only fits. Like an object that relinquishes its own integrity, a person who moulds themselves against you is creepy - a false friend.
... continue reading