Ah, German. The language in which being overly literal about how you build words leads to strangely non-literal complications!
I was helping out a local friend-of-a-friend-of-my-parents (or something), who writes articles about trains, and has one that's been translated into German to be published in a magazine in Germany, and he wanted to check and make sure they'd gotten everything right, so I read the German version of the article and then answered his questions about it. Anyway, that brought me across this gem of a linguistic fact:
A "Zugführer" and a "Lokführer" are both jobs on a train; however, despite the fact that they look practically like synonyms ("Zug" = "train" and "Lok" = "locomotive," and then they both contain the word "Führer," which can mean either "leader" or "driver," depending on context), they are emphatically not. The "Lokführer" is the engineer, the one who drives the train, while the "Zugführer" doesn't drive anything – that's the conductor, the person who goes through and takes tickets, etc. I suppose the logic here is that the "Zugführer" "leads" the train in some sense? So one is the "driver" of the "engine" and the other is the "leader" of the "train," and it just happens to come out looking like synonyms?
Why, German? Why?
This reminds me of my deep resentment when I first learned that the word "Zugbrücke" (which is LITERALLY "train" + "bridge") is not a train bridge. No, no, it's a drawbridge, because the word "Zug," though usually used to mean "train," actually derives from the verb "ziehen," which means "pull" or "draw," and thus a "Zugbrücke" is one that draws up. Duh, right?
And if you want to talk about an actual bridge that a train goes over, you have to say "Bahnbrücke" ("railway bridge").
Despite how clearly absurd all this is, I'm feeling nostalgic right now for the days when I got to muck around with the German language as my job all day!
(And appropriately, as I'm finishing writing this, the lonesome whistle of a freight train is wafting to me through the night air, as it passes through the edge of town. European trains are a hundred (a thousand) times superior when it comes to actual usability, but for nostalgia and romance, nothing beats a mournful American train whistle in the distance.)
