Germany, hardly the most laid-back place anyway, is on edge as it prepares to host this year's Group of 8 summit. Mark June 6-8 on your calendars, sports fans! If past summits are any guide, there's more in store than meetings of suits (and a skirt) capped by a ho-hum joint communiqué. To keep extraneous excitement at a decent distance, authorities have sealed off the venue, the Kempinski Grand Hotel at the Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm, with a 12-kilometer-long fence made of concrete and steel topped with rolls of razor wire. Nine naval ships will patrol the coast, border controls will be tightened, and potential troublemakers may be taken into preventative custody.

Earlier this month, police in half a dozen German cities raided homes, offices, and hangouts of anti-globalization activists suspected of planning attacks to disrupt the summit. Thousands of G-8 foes across Germany, mainly in Berlin and Hamburg, took to the streets in protest. The demo in Hamburg turned violent; eight people were arrested. Tempers flared further this week following reports that police had taken scent samples -- identifiable by sniffer dogs -- of several militant protesters. The action was reminiscent of methods, generally deemed to have stunk, used by former East Germany's snoopers to keep tabs on pesky dissidents.

A phantom whiff of another putrid period in Germany's past comes up on the government's official G-8 summit Web site, which refers to the participants with awkward precision as the major industrialized countries' Staats- und Regierungschefs ("heads of state and government"). In English, the going term is simply "leaders." The German cognate of "leader" is Leiter, a word used to describe the leader/head/director/manager of a company, school, orchestra, department, etc. The main word for "leader" in German is Führer. But because of its association with a certain historical figure, Führer is now problematic as a title for a national government's leader, and that goes double -- make that quadruple -- for Germany's.

In other languages too, words sometimes become discredited, of course. A recent example in American English is "decider."