Category Archives: Deutsch

Gierig (adj.): greedy, eager, voracious, avid (and complementary adverbs). I am snapping up all the interesting freelance jobs gierig.

You might be geldgierig, besitzgierig, or simply habgierig. Lately it seems I’m all three, spending money almost as quickly as I put my nose to the grindstone to earn it, dreaming of moving to the places I read about during working hours (Miami Beach, Portugal, Mars…). My main occupations during quarantine have been working and shopping online; altogether, I’m on screens for 10, 12 hours a day. Internetgierig. And happy for it.

Just this morning I assembled a new freestanding shelf with LED lights so my daughter can grow more plants; we are concertedly pflanzgierig. Amazongierig, really.

Gierig is thought to share a root with “yawning,” and doesn’t that make sense; a yawning desire, a cavernous space calling to be filled. What’s yawning in me is years lost to lassitude or indecision, months spent napping, days taken up with arduous tasks that saved a little money: mixing paint we’ll never match, making seedling pots from newspaper, Frankensteining fridge leftovers into less than the sum of their parts…

I don’t actually regret any of these things. They reflect a desire to use-what-I-have, an urge not to further burden the planet. But, during this shut-in time, I’m most enjoying the well tred, capitalist pattern of earn and burn, rinse and repeat and the accompanying buzz of receiving something brand new. Above all, I am zeitgierig lately: If having groceries delivered saves me 90 minutes, I take them and run. We’ll see how they even out, the greedy and the frugal. I know one thing: they’ll both relish using the hell out of this new Chinese plant shelf.

It’s not zuhausesuchen or wohnsitzsuchen or heimatsuchen… There’s something about that use of Heim in the word “to haunt; afflict; befall” (as war, a plague, a natural disaster) that really brings it home, just as if you visit me at my house it has a different feel than if you come to my home. Tax assessors visit my house; family comes to my home.

Heimsuchen originates in the Middle High German heime suochen “to seek someone out at home with good or ill intent.” Somewhere along the line the ill beat out the good, so that, at about the same time, the noun heimsuochunge meant “trespass.”

My boyfriend and I were talking one morning, in the house alone, when we heard a knock on the closed office door, clear as day, tap tap tap. Thinking my daughter had come home earlier than expected, I jumped up and opened the door. Nobody; not even a dog with a wayward tail or a hardworking cat (although it didn’t sound like a dog tail or a cat’s tenacity; it was human in origin).

Now and then, I remember that we’re being heimsucht by a polite ghost and hope something more will happen. Maybe I can’t use heimsuchen for such a retiring Casper, but the idea of a haunting by a considerate spirit, which is nonetheless an otherworldly haunting, does have that ambivalent feel that heimsuchen used to have. “Intent good or ill.” Remains to be seen.

This post should probably be about the adjectival form, aufwühlend, for that is what I aspire to with some of my writing: to conjure up a “stirring” read. Maybe I shouldn’t apply the word too soon; aufwühlend has more than a dab of “disturbing” to it, more Stephen King Misery than my latent novel.

The verb at the root, aufwühlen, means “to stir up,” “to rile/roil (as liquid),” “churn up” or “throw up (as dirt into the air).” Its root, in turn—wühlen—meant “to burrow (as an animal)” in the Middle Ages but was eventually brought to bear on human activities and forces of nature above ground. How great that the word, as in English, can be used in reference to either liquid or earth (or people’s emotions), that the emphasis here is on the action, not the medium. A verb that unites us all—even the air could be aufgewühlt, I would think.

Sometimes I think of my life as a series of currents and it my duty to keep my head above the surface. The metaphor carries with it my fear of drowning and, by extension, of failing in the things I do: parenting, partnering, working, housekeeping, maintaining sanity (!). We all have these currents that roil like a stirred ocean sometimes. To be ganz aufgewühlt by one of them means we do, in fact, have a soul—another medium, one whose form only comes into focus mit dem Aufwühlen.

Hegen jumped out at me from a really aggressively bad text I was proofreading. That happens when you play freelancer roulette. I’ve since learned to beware the job posters who don’t specify the subject of the job at hand; if the subject can’t be used to sell a job, it’ll probably be rife enough to lobotomize. Seriously. This was hazardous material.

I think hegen was used in the context of an idiom such as “harboring” either “doubt” or “ill will,” although hegen also means “to tend to” or “to cherish.” It comes from Hag (“hedge”), an 8th century word still in circulation in Switzerland and southern Germany, it seems, and the heart-rending meaning of fencing something in you care about.

There is still the phrase hegen und pflegen, common since the 1600’s, which I might have come closest to with “to hold near and dear.” There’s a distinction between hegen (“to tend to”) and pflegen (“to care for”) that has to do with the amount of soul being put in. Hegen/“tending” something or someone has much more the sense of “nurturing.”

At first, I couldn’t remember where I was the first time I saw a chain-link fence decorated with hand-written combination locks symbolizing devotion. It was cold, it was overlooking water, it was… Portsmouth, New Hampshire, maybe five years ago. To me, that gesture carries the soulfulness of fencing in, of holding near and dear, in a powerfully condensed, palpably everlasting form. I am now on the lookout for a fence and a padlock, some gritty little landmark to visit in 30 years, once I’ve learned not to bother with comatose words. Give me a minute.

Forsch is another word from my gig translating blurbs for a film-making company. It has nothing to do with forschen (to research); no, forsch comes directly from the French force and so its meaning is closer to the identical English word than to the Mittel Hochdeutsch roots of forschen.

Forsch is a classic case of the flexible use of German. So frequently I find that about five English words map onto a single one from the German; recently I tried and failed to discover if English actually had more words than German. That’s what my experience is, but then again German is so rich in compound words, depending on how you count them, the vocabulary is enorm.

Back to forsch. Some dictionaries, including the Google mega-engine and my 20-year-old PONS, translate it as “bold,” “brash,” or “brisk,” which is nice, right? A powerful, rousing word. Then I stumbled on the concept of a “forsche Frau” and things got a little lurid. Commonly used in dating-site editorials and the online equivalents of “Cosmopolitan” magazine (which I somehow avoided while living in Germany), eine forsche Frau is either “forward” or “assertive,” depending on whether you’re throwing shade on someone or boosting their jets. In the online forums and article I skimmed, forsch has a negative flavor to it in terms of dating behavior, verging on “pushy.” There was a whiff of “keeping a woman in her place.” In this context, I’d translate forsch as “forward” because it has a negative, conservative-traditional connotation, whereas “assertive” means “capable of negotiating a fair raise,” which is, well, awesome. There are plenty of examples of this usage, too, and, of course, men can be forsch. It just gets a titch dicey in certain conversations.

In sum, I’m a little unsure about where I’m going to use forsch. Maybe when describing the color, the act, the magnitude–the everything–of graffiti tags? Just be forewarned, if describing a woman as forsch to their face, their language might just get a little colorful with you.

One of my cool jobs this week is translating for a company that films trailers for books. Chin deep in synopses, I came across the adjective kinoreif. It’s an elegant and more German alternative to descriptors like filmisch or (more of a rarity) kinematisch.

I looked it up to find it doesn’t have a dedicated entry in my favorite etymological source, the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, but the online compendium nonetheless generated results from its corpora.¹ This source shows citations dating back only to the early ’00’s. MyDict.com, another site that anchors German words in publications (mainly newspapers), traces it back to 1996.

Results from Linguee.com—which scours the Web for bilingual translations to give you the most common usages on the Internet—cite kinoreif on the Apple and Adobe websites, suggesting it meets German copywriting standards. Meanwhile, there’s hardly a peep about anything reif on my current go-to for all words colloquial, MundMische.de.

Is it a relatively new word, coined in response to an influx of foreign words? Filmisch breathes English and kinematisch is a trainwreck of Greek and French. The DWDS lists a scant handful of words that have -reif as a suffix, and most of them have to do with the actual softening of fruit. It’s not used like -mäßig, anyway, which will backflip into bed with anyone.

I can’t tell why the word receives such scant attention from either the hoary source or the slangy one. Macht nichts. I like it and I’m going to juice it for all its worth.

Das Verhängnis (“destiny, doom, downfall” or—my favorite—”undoing”) carves a mysterious path through German. I’d like it to bend in on itself, like an old river, and create a pool of sense, but it doesn’t. According to hoary sources, the progression is from hängen—verhängen—Verhängnis (from “to hang” to “impose a punishment/a curfew, etc.” to “downfall”).² See what I mean? How do you get from “hanging” to “imposing”?

I’d like there to be some written report from the Medieval justice system explaining that sentences for a crime were hung on the castle gate. Then I could understand how rulings were verhängt. Or, what might be even more likely, that hangings were such a common mortal sanction that a new verb was coined because of them.

I got nowhere, however, in searching for either derivation. For now I’m satisfied with the translation of “undoing” because it is formed from the root verb and a privative: a prefix that negates. I was just flirting with privatives when I wrote, a couple days ago, that verschwommen seems to be the poetic decay of schwimmen (calling it the reverse Midas touch-effect). Evidently, there’s a term for that, and it’s “privative.”

Whether ver- is actually considered a privative, I don’t know; I don’t think so. It’s not mean enough. But at least Verhängnis and “undoing” have a similar root-prefix structure.

Meanwhile, it’s time to get back to paid work, before this blog mir zum Verhängnis wird/”is my undoing.”

Generally, the German prefix ver- is the linguistic equivalent of the reverse Midas touch (or, as I like to call it, the Minimas touch). This is not a perfect logic, but there are examples of word pairs such as schlafen, “to sleep”—which is how productive society members bridge the gap between bedtime social media and morning yoga—and verschlafen, or “to oversleep,” which means the dentist is charging you for that early-AM appointment you’re missing.

Verschwommen doesn’t work this way, exactly, but it’s got a tinge of that action. Schwimmen is the verb “to swim” or “to float,” while verschwimmen is “to blur,” “to become indistinct.” Or—my favorite, here—”to swim” as in “to swim before someone’s eyes.” Man, I get such a kick out of translation that works out like that. It’s as though my brain were wired to operate not just on dopamine but on dopameaning.

Of course, that’s just my (professional but not PhD’d) interpretation of the poetic connections at play here. The Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache makes note of a connection between the root of schwimmen and schwemmen, “to wash (away)” or “to water.” It also notes that verschwommen has been used in relation to vision and being “indistinct,” “dissolv[ing] in the distance, as an image” since the 1700’s. Again, I like the image of people with verschwommenes Sehen (“blurred vision”) treading slowly as though underwater.

No surprise, really, that the English “blur” is suspected of arising from “blear” (as in today’s “bleary eyes,” don’t you think?) and running parallel to the Middle High German blerre. ³ Why and at what point Germans dropped the blear, I wonder? Maybe they were just as punch-drunk over giving schwimmen its reverse Midas touch as I am.

Who wants their neck abraded by some stinky wolfskin hat? And who wants to be the butt of a joke? Schabernack, literally “scrap(er)neck,” means “prank,” or maybe better “humbug” in its obsolete meaning of “hoax” that’s maybe as old as Schabernack. ³

The obsolete masculine noun is used with or without an article: “Ihr treibt doch fiesen Schabernack mit mir.” It traces back to the Middle Ages in Germany, when a “schabernac” was a “coarse, neck-chafing winter hat.” I picture a raw-edged animal pelt worn by commoners—perhaps a wolf hide, since wolves were widely hunted (and, interestingly, smell odious, then and now)—although information is hard to come by here. The word also meant “mockery” at this early stage. ²

Another etymological source traces the word’s roots back to the Gothic skaban—or scheren, to shear—and the old punishment of shearing the hair off the back of the head (I assume so scofflaws could be recognized, but it’s also a haircut bad enough it takes on the humiliating flavor of a prank). ³

Since then, the meanings of “a warm but irritating hat,” a “criminal recognizable by his bad haircut,” and “mockery” underwent some linguistic alchemy to mean, roughly, a more-or-less warmly intended, irritating trick played on someone. And a new style of Covid-do, the short-long “humbuzz,” might just take off.

I’m reminded here of my northern-German ex-boyfriend, who used to harangue early flat-screen TV’s with quirky insults when Borussia Dortmund games got real (“Du alte Schlange!!!”). I can see him tossing Schabernack around.

There is at least one town called Schabernack, where the residents attribute the name to deforested hillsides in previous centuries, which looked for all the world like a neck with a 5 o’clock shadow. ⁴

Schabernack might be yanked from the dictionary dust: I’ve seen it used in literature of the past 20 years ⁵ and even on merchandise: I am absolutely ordering a Schabernack beanie in wolfhide gray from spreadshirt.de to celebrate my first post.