Language Ragbag

Every now and then I put together a "ragbag" post of all the bits and pieces that have caught my interest enough to jot down, but which don't really make for a full post alone. In this case, they're all language-related bits and pieces, either things I find amusing about German, or differences I find intriguing between German and English. Here we go!


• "Zusammen oder getrennt?" ("Together or separately?")

This is the standard question asked when a group of people goes to pay at the end of a meal, because in Germany, it's standard for the server to split the bill and for each person to pay separately – so convenient!

But also, as a French colleague recently pointed out, it makes for this awkward moment right after the question is asked, where you don't want to be the one to say "getrennt, bitte" because it kind of makes you sound cheap or overly obsessed with paying only exactly your own part...even though it's normal to do it that way here.

Do Germans feel awkwardness in that moment? I assume not, since they grow up with this.

(This conversation came up because, at the Middle Eastern place where my office-share colleagues and I often have lunch, there's one server who really loves languages, and likes to address us each in our own language. Then he learned that my French colleague is half Italian, so he tries to speak Italian to him. The colleague sort of gently complained to me, "He always asks me how to say things in Italian that you don't actually say in Italian." (Like "together or separately," which you wouldn't ask in Italy, where, as in the US, you get one bill and figure out among yourselves how best to cover each person's part.))


• "to go" – phrase that has become standard usage in German. As in, "Einen Kaffee to go, bitte." I guess it's understandable, since the equivalent would be the mouthful "zum Mitnehmen."


• "house-warming Party" is apparently now also in usage in German! A student of mine (middle-aged, intermediate English level) got invited to a younger cousin's "house-warming Party" (instead of the usual German "Einweihungsparty") and wanted to know what that means. Then she kept forgetting exactly what the word was and referring to it with slight variations. ("What was it? A house-heating party?")


• "Es weihnachtet!" – the same French colleague as above pointed out how lovely it is German the way you can create new forms of almost any word. "Weihnachten" (noun) means Christmas, and while "weihnachten" (verb) maybe doesn't technically exist as a word in the dictionary, lots of people would say it, and everyone would understand. "Es weihnachtet" is like, it's getting Christmas-y, it feels like Christmas, we're in a Christmas mood. But how lovely to be able to look around as a few flakes of snow start to drift down and declare the equivalent of "It's christmasing!"


• Another wonderful not-quite-real word:

The adjective "fremd" means "foreign" or "stranger," or also just "other/external/something that's not our own." So a "Fremdnetzwerk" would be a computer network outside my own company, say, but also "fremdgehen" (literally "to go foreign/other") means to cheat on your partner.

So, one day at the office one guy had made other plans and thus wouldn't be joining the rest of us for lunch as usual. Another colleague commented, "Er ist heute Fremdesser" – he's a "foreign eater," i.e., eating elsewhere and not with us!


• "jein" – this semi-made-up is a combination of "ja" and "nein," and does in fact mean the same as saying, "Well, yes and no..." Yes, people really say this.


• "Planungssicherheit" – this came up in a translation I did (about the history of Berlin nightlife and how it's changed over the decades) and oh my goodness, what a German word.

"Planung" just means "planning" and "Sicherheit" means security, so "Planungssicherheit" is like a secure, stable situation, a situation in which it's possible to plan ahead. Because Germans don't just plan, they also plan to plan.


• "Indian Summer" – sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine that bugs me to no end. It's a classic case of "I do not think that word means what you think it means," where German borrows a phrase but borrows it wrong, so then you've got all these people saying something, in English, which they think is English, but is really not. In this case – I think because the kind of brilliant fall colors we get in the northeastern US don't exist here, and thus are a foreign concept that needs to be labeled with its own term – Germans have taken the American term "Indian summer" (i.e., a period of unseasonably warm weather that occurs after fall has already started) and apply it to all of American-style fall, with its changing leaves and all the other trappings that are a part of every year's autumn. Whenever a German eagerly tells me, "We're going to the US to see the Indian summer!" I cringe and try really hard to bite my tongue.


• I find it fascinating that what in English is called the "Middle East," in German is the "Naher Osten" ("Near East"). Because, if you think about it, geographically it really is a lot nearer!


• Also, I've been thinking lately about the subtle difference between the words "any" and "every" (and their related words, like "anywhere" and "everywhere," "anyone" and "everyone").

What "subtle difference" I imagine (/pretend) I hear you ask? What could be more different than "any" (pick one out of all the things) and "every" (have all the things)?

Well, in German – as was driven home to me while trying to teach this difference to a student of mine – there is no difference. "Überall" means both "everywhere" and "anywhere." "Jeder" means both "everyone" and "anyone." "Alles" means "everything" and also "anything."

My student is very intelligent and speaks very good English, but as a German speaker, she just couldn't get the difference between "everything" ("I'm so hungry, I'm going to eat everything in the fridge") and "anything" ("I'm not picky, I'll eat anything.") In German, both those sentences would be "Ich esse alles."


• Not actually a language thing, but I'll toss it into the ragbag, since it's something I was thinking about recently: It seems all Germans have electric toothbrushes. They're not something for people particularly concerned about dental health, or people particularly nuts about electronic gadgetry, or any other specific subset. They're just what everyone has. Personally, I think it's some kind of dentists' cabal, because even American friends of mine here have ended up bullied into buying an electric toothbrush by their dentists.

This is not because Germans are unusually concerned with dental hygiene (they don't even floss!) so I have to conclude this is truly just the German obsession with gadgets rearing its head once again. (Come on, a people who have a device in their kitchens for adding carbonation to tap water, to make their own sparkling water? Of course they're going to have an electric toothbrush.)


• An American friend was visiting here, learning some German, and pointed out (this is the kind of thing you don't notice anymore, once you know the language) just how hilarious the German word for "dinner" – "Abendessen" – is. Because it literally means "evening food." Lunch is the same – "Mittagessen," or "midday food."

But what takes the cake is the word for "breakfast": "Frühstück," or literally "early piece."

Ah, endless fun with deconstructing German words! (Though let's not forget to examine "breakfast," which literally is the meal in which you break the fast you have kept over the night while you were sleeping.)


• "hinterherhinken" is just generally an awesome-looking word. It means "to lag behind."


• I only just found out that "Dutzend" ("dozen"), unlike in English, is an archaic word that people don't really use anymore in German, a quaint-sounding measurement like "Zentner" ("hundredweight"). My personal theory about this is that "dozen" is still normal in English because it's standard for us to buy eggs by the dozen, and it's fallen out of usage in German because eggs here are bought in sets of ten!


• I also find it fascinating and strange that in German, while an adult has a "Schlafzimmer" (bedroom), a child has a "Kinderzimmer" (literally "child's room"). I guess it makes sense, since children also spend a lot of time playing in their rooms, not just sleeping?

Similarly, an adult's birthday party is a "Geburtstagsfeier" ("birthday party") but a child's birthday party is a "Kindergeburtstag" ("child's birthday"). Why aren't children allowed to have parties??


• Probably one of the worst words in all existence: "Lebensabschnittsgefährte." This means, not kidding you here at all, "my significant other during this segment of my life." Seriously, could there be anything worse than introducing your partner as "this is the person I'm not going to spend the rest of my life with"??


 • Somehow it took me until this year (after 7+ years in Germany...) to notice that when people talk about that week between Christmas and New Year's, they say "zwischen den Jahren" – "between the years."

As in, hey, I'm visiting my family for Christmas, but I'm back in Berlin after that, so let's meet up between the years.

How strange and sweet.


• And did you know that German fairy tales end not with "And they lived happily ever after" but with a phrase that means, "And if they haven't died, they're still alive today"?

Isn't that strange and...fittingly German?


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Also, rants I will spare you, by simply alluding to them in passing and thus heading myself off from working up to a full rant about them:


• People who are rude should not be librarians. Thus Germans, or at least Berliners (I know, I know, there are other parts of the country where people are somewhat friendly to each other), should not be librarians.

Librarians – though I know this might be hard to spot – are there to help people find books. Not to bite their heads off, or to sigh and look put out when they dare to ask a question. And I say this based not on one experience at one library, but on seven years' worth of frustration!


• German theater is crap. I'm sorry, I was trying to keep an open mind, but it really is just crap. (I say this as a person who spent years working in theater, and years writing plays, and who's been going to plays for as long as I can remember or possibly even before.)

Running around screaming, throwing things and trying to be as shocking and/or incomprehensible as possible is not theater. That's just crap. Call me old-fashioned (apparently I am old-fashioned, at least over here) but I prefer a play that actually has characters. Who interact with each other. About subject matter.

(A German acquaintance who seems to have similar taste to me told me about a couple of theaters in Berlin that still put on older works – you know, from the days when playwrights actually wrote plays – so maybe I'll check out those.)

And don't even get me started about the specific theater I recently attended that prompted this rant, where they didn't even open the doors to let the audience from the lobby into the theater until 5 minutes after the scheduled starting time; my friends and I (understandably, I feel) took this as our cue to go to the bathroom a last time, while the rest of the audience was filing into the theater. Two minutes later, when we entered the theater, the woman working the door hissed at us, "Wir warten allen schon!" ("We're all wait already!") Then, once all the audience was seated and the actors in place, the same woman realized she'd left the house lights on and had to walk back through the entire audience to go turn them off so the play could start.

Sigh.


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And on that grinchly note...  Happy solstice! Happy darkest day and longest night of the year! I'm off to re-read John Donne's marvelously depressive reflection on this darkest moment of the year, "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day," in which he describes all the ways in which the world is dark and dead, then says, "yet all these seem to laugh/Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph."

John Donne, master poet of the 17th century and original emo kid.

Seriously, this is one of my favorite points in the year, this day of deepest, deepest dark, from which it can only grow lighter again. I love that so many cultures have holidays around now that celebrate light and life and greenery. I love that Christmas is pagan even though it doesn't realize it is. I love that today in Berlin the sun set at 3:54 pm.