ENGLISH MUST be the Zimbabwean dollar of European languages, so devalued have many of its words become in popular usage. But until recently, imported German terms were still hard currency. Now it seems that hyperinflation has caught up even with these, writes Frank McNally.
Consider a quote from Tuesday's Daily Telegraph, previewing tactics for the Champions' League football match between Roma and Manchester United. This is what it said: "Cristiano Ronaldo has become accustomed to seeing angst-ridden Premier League opponents furiously back-pedalling. . . but that won't [ happen] in Rome tonight."
Time was, not long ago, angst was still the preserve of intellectuals. You needed a good university degree - 2:1 or better - before you could even aspire to it. No doubt increased social mobility has made the emotion more widely available since then, and perhaps this is progress. But has it really become so common in the English Premiership? Chambers Dictionary defines the word as "a general feeling of anxiety produced by the awareness of the uncertainties and paradoxes inherent in the state of being human". And OK, maybe the sight of an advancing Ronaldo would provoke such thoughts in a defender with a sensitive nature.
On the other hand, we know from the writings of Grame Le Saux - a Premiership full-back who may well have been angst-ridden - that English football is a world in which you can be persecuted for reading the Guardian and wearing Pringle socks.
In the macho culture of the dressing room, such habits are apparently interpreted as indications of homosexuality: the theme most popular with Le Saux's opponents.
By coincidence, two of his main tormentors were called "Robbie". But their surnames - "Savage" and "Fowler", respectively - were probably more expressive of the general thinking of Premiership players, when confronted by Cristiano Ronaldo or otherwise. I doubt if angst comes into it much.
My old German textbook informs me that the language has two quite different words for fear: "angst" and "furcht". Angst is the more general emotion: a response to pain or loss, or the prospect of death. "Furcht" is a more directed fear: caused by an immediate, material threat.
The latter condition would be much more likely in a football match, you would think. So they may or may not have been "furiously back-pedalling", to use the DT's words. But I suggest that when the Roma defenders saw Ronaldo steaming in for United's first goal on Tuesday, "furcht" is what they were feeling, more or less.
IF ANY members of a football team are vulnerable to angst, it must surely be the goalkeepers. It cannot be a coincidence that so many writers and thinkers have played between the posts: from Patrick Kavanagh (Inniskeen Grattans), to Arthur Conan Doyle (Portsmouth FC), to Albert Camus (Racing Universitaire Algerios).
Although Camus's goalkeeping career was cut short by TB, he once claimed it had taught him important lessons about "morality and the duty of man". He certainly knew all about angst, but unlike the Daily Telegraph's Premiership players, he refused to be ridden by it.
In his existentialist essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, he used the Greek mythological figure - condemned to roll a rock up a hill and then watch it roll down again, forever - as a metaphor for man's search for meaning. Rather than succumb to despair, Camus concluded, man must embrace the struggle. (Perhaps there is a lesson there for defenders facing Ronaldo: maybe they could embrace him?)
Even the late Pope John Paul II kept goal for his school team.
And another well-known seeker of truth, the former sports broadcaster David Icke, filled the position at a much higher level: playing professionally for Coventry City and Hereford United, before arthritis ended his career.
Perhaps it was there that Icke began his mission to "investigate who and what is really controlling the world". A search that in time would lead him to believe he was the "Son of God", and to claim that the planet had been taken over by reptilian humanoids, including George Bush snr, the English Queen Mother, and Kris Kristofferson. Angst could certainly have been a factor in these beliefs.
I DON'T know if Ulick O'Connor ever played in goal during his career as an all-round athlete. But I was reading his collected sports journalism - Sport Is My Lifeline - recently and was impressed to learn that he once marked the famous Stanley Matthews in a game between "Old Ireland" and "Old England" played before 30,000 people in Dalymount Park in 1969.
If he didn't experience angst on that occasion, he definitely experienced furcht.
"It was like being asked to mark Hermes," he wrote (referring to the Greek god, not the women's hockey club). Hermes was notable for, among other things, wearing winged boots. And given Stanley Matthews's reputation for ghosting past defenders even when they knew exactly what he was going to do, the comparison was justified.
In any event, O'Connor hatched a plan with a team-mate to double-mark the great Englishman.
But then Matthews switched wings (on the pitch, that is, not on his boots), and soon he was inflicting his famous body swerve on the former Irish international Shay Keogh instead.
Keogh told O'Connor about the experience afterwards. "I went in on him carefully, because I knew about his swerve," he said.
But it was no use: "Suddenly I was running in the wrong direction."
That sounds close enough to angst; even if was probably more a case of furcht, again.