Foreign-Word-Learning-Joy

Mortification with a K Things That Make You Different From M...

Foreign-Word-Learning-Joy

For Christmas, the item on top of my wish list was the new book Schottenfreude: New German Words for the Human Condition, by Ben Schott. He’s a journalist, photographer, and designer who trained his sights on a quirk of the German language: there really aren’t that many nouns in it. So when the need for a new word arises, German culture just strings together a bunch of related words to describe it.

German is to compound nouns as Miley Cyrus is to dance moves you wouldn’t want your kids to imitate. So Schott came up with plausible German nouns like, “Schmutzwortsuche,” or “dirty-word-search” – looking up dirty words in the dictionary. And “Tageslichtspielschock” – “day-light-show-shock” – being startled when exiting a theater in broad daylight. (For more examples, see this NYTimes piece.)

I started learning German in sixth grade, an age where my brain could still soak up language like a bag of dried beans dumped into hot water. Then I studied in Vienna in college, and lived for Munich for a couple of years in my early twenties. That was twenty-plus years ago and my German’s considerably rustier now, but I can still sing you songs of the German parts of speech and conjugate verbs six ways til Sonntag. And I still miss the German words that express concepts for which there is no English language counterpart as precise.

These are the German words I’m mostly likely to throw into my English sentences, especially when I’m talking to myself.

Schaffen – a verb which means, “to handle, to manage, to git ‘er done.” As in, “I know this couch is expensive, but I think we can schaff it if I get paid on time for last month’s feature story.”

Scheiβe – actually, there’s a very precise English word for this – think the French word “merde” – but everyone knows that when you swear in a foreign language in front of your kids, it’s less damaging. This is also the first German word that my kids learned. Yay, parenting.

Ganz Gemütlich – “Very Gemütlich”, Gemütlichkeit being a Saxon-tastic state of coziness, warmth, just-rightness. As explained by my Austrian Literature professor to a roomful of American twenty year olds: “Gemütlich is when the pillows are fluffed just so,” demonstrating with a chop of the hand how to make the center dimple on a throw pillow that meant so much to German speaking people. It baffled me that a properly fluffed pillow could mean so much, considering how I barely made my bed or picked my clothes up off the floor at that age. But I moved back to America and become a Grown Up, and my pillows are chopped to a state of ganz Gemütlichkeit every time I clean.

Weiβ Ich Nicht – means “don’t know,” which obviously isn’t unique to German. But I say this one with a Schwabish accent as tutored by my German then-boyfriend’s mother who hailed from that region, so it sounds like one smeary word wrapped up in utter disinterest: “veezeeschnitt.” Must be delivered with a shoulder shrug, while you turn away from the person who asked the question.

Ich drücke dir die Daumen – the German equivalent of “fingers crossed!” is “thumbs pressed!” Or in this case, “I press my thumbs for you.” That same former German bf had an endearing variation on this one to communicate the fervency of his hopes on someone else’s behalf: “Ich drücke alle verfügbaren Daumen,” or, “I press all available thumbs.” I always pictured him running around, pressing the thumbs of strangers in earnest helpfulness. So that’s what I say, in English: I press all available thumbs.

What about you? What are the words of foreign extraction that you wish had an English counterpart? (My friend Alexandra from Good Day, Regular People once wrote a great guest post for me about Colombian-isms, if you’d prefer a Latin American variety.) Add them in the comments – and don’t forget to give pronunciation.

It’s still early enough in January to make resolutions. Let’s all improve ourselves by learning a few new foreign words for 2014.

I bet we can schaff it.