Sprache der Anmache! Sprachspielerische Mechanismen der Anmachsprüche
Language of Pickup Lines: Wordplay and Wit in Flirtation

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to examine the concept of „play“ in a broad sense as a form of social interaction and to apply it to the realm of flirting, seduction, and pick-up lines. The focus is on the language of this form of interaction, its characteristic features, and the playful linguistic mechanisms at work. Special attention is given to the rhetorical and semantic strategies that structure the communicative play between seriousness and irony, closeness and distance, openness and concealment. Based on a selected corpus of typical flirt and pick-up lines, linguistic devices such as wordplay, hyperbole, paradox, repetition, ambiguity, and conventionalized expressions are analyzed. These phenomena serve not only to create humor but also to test social boundaries and establish asymmetric roles within the interaction. The analysis shows that many of these utterances are characterized by wordplay, creative use of language, and playful breaking of conventional communication norms. Humor often arises from the combination of expectation violation, exaggeration, and ambiguity. A single flirt line can simultaneously be understood as a compliment and an ironic self-presentation. At the same time, these forms reveal an ambivalent function: what may appear as a charming game with language and social codes can also be perceived as crude, intrusive, or even offensive. The article thus aims to uncover the mechanisms behind this linguistic ambivalence and to show how humor, creativity, and social boundary-crossing are interwoven and mutually dependent in the linguistic play of flirtation.

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