today in intriguing german loanwords:

kassiber • a letter smuggled out of jail, a secret coded message.

the word originally comes from the practice of red army faction prisoners using their attorneys to smuggle letters out of the stammheim prison but now refers to any type of secret coded message. it’s derived from the yiddish word kessaw meaning “written.”

my infatuation with prison culture is well documented and so is my obsession with secret codes. so it only stands to reason that i will one day marry this word and have many beautiful babies with it and all of the babies will be named kassiber junior.

today in intriguing german loanwords:

künstlerroman • a novel that has as its main theme the formative years of an artist.

some english examples of this sub-sub-genre are »

David Copperfield, The Tragic Muse, Martin Eden, In Search of Lost Time, Sons and Lovers, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Of Human Bondage, This Side of Paradise, To the Lighthouse, Black Boy & Life Is Elsewhere

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yesterday in intriguing german loanwords:

a while back i made a post about the very intriguing geisterfahrer “a driver who mysteriously appears on the wrong side of the road.” i wondered why there was a need to name this seemingly rare phenomenon and was content with urban dictionary’s explanation: daredevils, drunks and suicides. and then this guy named luke (who is a real person) wrote to me with the following tale that sheds a whole new light on the geisterfahrer. said luke:

Before WWII, Austria’s drivers motored on the left side of the road. Being quite close physically and culturally, Germans and Austrians visited each other and understandably struggled to stay on the proper side. During WWII the Austrians changed their driving laws (cough, Hilter’s invasion and subsequent martial laws, cough).

My friends grand father was killed by a geisterfahrer after the rules changed. The anonymous on-coming driver had reverted to old habits and was on the wrong side of the road.

today in intriguing german loanwords:

geisterfahrer • a driver who mysteriously appears on the wrong side of the road.

urban dictionary clears up the mystery on why german speakers need a word for this seemingly rare phenomenon:

[Its literal translation is] “Ghost Driver;” a driver who drives on the wrong direction on an autobahn, often with headlights turned off at night. Usually a drunk driver but can also be a thrill seeker, suicide attempt, or horrendous driver error.

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finally: i collected german loanword posts together into one tag. it is this one

update: luke (a real person) clears up the mystery, here.

today in intriguing german loanwords:

schlimmbesserung • a so-called improvement that makes things worse

off the top of my head: scrolling on osx lion, how my dad now puts a bar of bitter chocolate into his famous bunkhouse chili, 3d movies, my new van dyke beard, the effects of botox, the new budweiser identity, et cetry, et cetry.

what falls on your schlimmbesserung list?

yesterday in intriguing greek words

tascodrugian • a nose-picker

according to epiphanius:

They are called Tascodrugians for the followin reason. Their word for “peg” is “tascus,” and “drungus” is their word for “nostril” or “snout.” And since they put their licking finger, as we call it, on their nostril when they pray…some people have given them the name of Tascodrugians, or “nose-pickers.”

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source: the panarion of epiphanius of salamis, vol. 2 by frank williams

today in intriguing german loanwords:

der lachende erbe • a relative distant enough to not feel grief upon your death but close enough to benefit from your will 

the literal translation, a “laughing heir,” (ie. an heir that laughs all the way to the bank upon learning of your gruesome death-journey through the gastrointestinal tract of the loch ness monster) has become a recognized term in the law of inheritance as well as a popular dickensian trope.

today in intriguing german loanwords

torschlusspanik • fear of being left out

literally: “door-shutting panic.”

this was my state of emotion back when my father’s company was giving away free zeppelin rides at a corporate picnic and i went to climb aboard the dirigible (with the secret intention of zeppelin-jacking it and piloting it to my himalayan library castle) when the captain (the hungarian uncle of my childhood arch-nemesis) measured me (humiliatingly) with a yardstick and announced to the crowd (which was brimming with débutantes competing for the brief focus of my deficient attention span) that i was not “of adequate stature to board the zeppelin” and that with my “puerile” (yet exquisitely-sculpted) “chicken legs,” i was better suited for the sandbox and sifting around for “buried rabbit turds.”

you wonder why 8 of the 9 members of my entourage are licensed personal trainers, why i taught myself how to do sleep crunches, why i eat a 5-egg creatine omelet every morning, the answer is torschlusspanik.

today in intriguing german loanwords:

sitzfleisch • the ability to endure a boring activity

this is a good word for me right now because i am watching eat, pray, love on my lunch break.

today in intriguing german loanwords:

according to jimmy wales, gemütlichkeit means »

… “coziness”; however, rather than merely describing a place that is compact, well-heated and nicely furnished (a cozy room, a cozy flat), Gemütlichkeit connotes the notion of belonging, social acceptance, cheerfulness, the absence of anything hectic and the opportunity to spend quality time.

i’ve been searching for a word to describe my swinger den and and this more-or-less nails it. i just need to get the throw pillows reupholstered and i will soon be back in business.

the most beautiful german words

in october 2004—when the boston red sox were homerunning themselves to becoming the champions of world baseball—the goethe institute and the council for the german language were conducting their own little competition. their goal was to determine the most beautiful german word based on over 20,000 entries. here are the leading contenders.

• lebenslust - zest for life
• erdbeermund - voluptuous lips
• teufelsbraten - rascal
• wolkenkuckucksheim - cloud cuckoo land
• glueck - happiness
• liebe - love
• mitgefuehl - compassion
• pusteblume - dandelion
• sehnsucht - longing
• vergissmeinnicht - forget-me-not

the real star of this list is obviously wolkenkuckucksheim. apparently, it means an “unrealistically idealistic state where everything is perfect,” which makes it close in meaning to the english bizarro world.

drumroll please: the german word judged to be the most beautiful was habseligkeiten which refers to the paltry belongings of an almost penniless person. now go forth and use these words to write philosophy.

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source here.

falkentheorie

while the literary f-words that i posted earlier this morning were delightful in many respects, their definitions did little to highlight the wit and droll tone of j.a. cuddon’s radiant dictionary. to accomplish that task, let us consult a much beefier definition for the following f-word.

Falkentheorie: a theory of the novella worked out by the German writer Paul Heyse (1830-1914). This theory is based on the ninth tale of the fifth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron (c. 1349-51). It is the story of Federigo who wasted his substance in the fruitless wooing of a rich mistress; wasted it to such an extent that he had only his favourite falcon left. This, too, he scarificed—and his mistress was so moved by the act that she surrendered. The falcon is thus symbolic and denotes the strongly marked silhouette—as Heyse puts it—which, according to him, distinguishes one novella from another and gives it a unique quality. An interesting but elaborate theory, which is only another way of saying that each story is different from the others.

what a punchline! amirite?!?

the german word for skunk

is das stinktier, the literal translation of which is the stink animal.