Whatever. As I understand it, ‘blitz’ entered
the English language as a shortening of ‘blitzkrieg’ (‘lightning
war’) and came to mean, at least in Australian usage, ‘any swift,
vigorous attack on something viewed as a problem or on those responsible’.
In the modern fashion, the noun became also a verb, meaning ‘to attack
with a blitz’.
Now as to ‘blitzen’, my very small German-English
dictionary tells me that this is a verb, meaning to flash or emit
flashes. Possibly, the word is also a plural form of a noun. Curiously,
the word is associated in English with the name of one of Santa’s reindeer.
The slightest dip into Google will bring to light that that name is said by
some to be incorrect, the original name being ‘Blixem’, from the
Dutch for ‘lightning’, a change to ‘Blixen’ being made
by an early English writer to achieve a better rhyme with ‘Vixen’. Then,
in 1844, a writer who knew German but not Dutch was puzzled by the word and
changed it to ‘Blitzen’.
