Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?
Deutsche Freunde, could you please create for me a word for the extreme depression I feel when I bend down to pick up a piece of litter and discover two more pieces of litter?
um = around
die Welt = world
die Umwelt = environment
ver = prefix to indicate something difficult or negative, a change that leads to deterioration or even destruction that is difficult to reverse or to undo, or a strong negative change of the mental state of a person
der Müll = garbage, trash, rubbish, litter
-ung = -ing
die Vermüllung = littering
ver- = see before
zweifeln = to doubt
-ung = see before
die Verzweiflung = despair, exasperation, desperation
die Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung = …
This is a german compound on the spot master class and I am LIVING
This is one of the reasons why I used to love studying German. I hope to go back to it some day…
THIS IS WHY GERMANS CHEAT ON THE WORD LIMIT AT INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITIES
Ooooooh! THIS is why we are not allowed to write our exams in German at international universities. Now I understand!
This is why German universities have a character limit on papers instead of a word limit!
Due to tumblr’s limit on the number of links that can be put in a single post I am breaking up the German resource list into two posts. This is the vocabulary section:
so my friend is studying abroad in germany this semester
My mom is German and told me what the fuck these were actually trying to mean.
“You can me once” is supposed to mean “you can kiss my ass ONCE ” As in like,, you can be a suck up once.
“What must, THAT MUST” is supposed to be “it is what it is”
“Now butter by the fishes is a German saying that is more like ” can I have some butter with the fish?“ Which basically means ” get to he point of the story. “
These are somehow just as confusing as the coasters
I don’t wanna shit on someone’s mother, but the actual correct explanations should make more sense.
“You Can Me Once”: “Du kannst mich mal (am Arsch lecken).” This is the equivalent to “kiss my ass”. “Mal” which was googled into ‘once’ here is just a filler word used to complete the half-sentence, it does not actually mean anything. Just like “kiss my ass” is ironically not about asskissing but about telling someone to fuck off, fuck you, so is “Du kannst mich mal.”
“What must that must”: “Was muss das muss”. Not completely wrong up there, but more precisely, it’s “you gotta do what you gotta do”. Often muttered as a politely vague reply to someone you randomly meet asking “how’s life” when life’s shit or you’re running an unpleasant errant/on a doctor’s visit etc.
“Now butter by the fishes”: “Butter bei die Fische” (which btw is not standard German grammar but that’s exactly how we say it, I’m honestly not sure why… may have its root in a dialect or other Germanic language). Correct translation here, it means to get to the point, get real for a second. Explanation? By the time you plop a piece of butter on a grilled or baked fish, it’s ready to eat, aka you ‘got to the point of the meal’.
Hope this makes more sense now!
Reminded of one misconception I saw come up again recently, by one wtfduolingo post I reblogged earlier.
I don’t recall running across the word in Swedish before, oddly enough, but I wasn’t surprised that it’s “dum” and “dummare”.
Compare to “dumm” and “dümmer” in German. Which got snagged into American English from the huge number of German-speaking immigrants.
(Where “mute/silent” is “stumm”, BTW, with a totally different etymology. That incidentally got taken into British English, as “keeping schtum”. Snitches get stitches…)
Speaking of very direct usage adoption, as Mencken observed in the 1920s:
Dumb-head, obviously from the German dummkopf, appears in a list of Kansas words collected by Judge J. C. Ruppenthal, of Russell, Kansas. (Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. v, 1916, p. 322.) It is also noted in Nebraska and the Western Reserve, and is very common in Pennsylvania.
Dumb still not really used in that sense in British English–or probably other versions–which is likely why Duolingo opted for the “stupid” and “more stupid” translation there. (Which kinda jumped out at me, when “dumb” and “dumber” is a less clunky rendering. Better to use something more readily understood across dialects, though.)
People are certainly welcome to a variety of opinions on the advisability of those descriptions anyway, of course. But, the real etymology isn’t what it’s often assumed to be. Because English, and alleyways.
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