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. 1 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.
