Big Garbage Can't

Normally I start these out with a brief introduction before we jump into weird German words. Introductions are really hard, by the way. Which is why I’m not going to do one this time!

The other reason why I’m not doing the normal introduction for this one is that I’m really excited and just want to introduce a word to you guys real quick. I’m excited because Germany is finally taking steps to decriminalize dumpster diving! It’s about time, and though this has nothing to do with the rest of this article, it had me so happy that I wanted to share with you guys our word for dumpster diving.

I must have mentioned at some point before that German doesn’t really lend itself to creating new verbs. Nouns are easy. We can glue as many of those together as we want and make a beautiful, beautiful compound mess. But verbs don’t come as easily to us, probably because verb usage in general is a bit more complicated in German. It’s easy in English, you just have to tack a “to” in front of any noun and you’ve got yourself a verb. I often envy you guys for that.

But this time, German also managed to do the fun thing. Dumpster diving is called containern. Ich containere, du containerst, er/sie/es containert. While in English, a container can be anything that holds stuff, in German we use the noun der Container only for big ones. For freight containers, for example, or for large garbage receptacles. I wouldn’t call my own garbage can a Container, but the big ones that supermarkets use are Container. (Yeah, in German the plural would just be Container again. Sorry. See, this is why stuff gets complicated.)

So just this once, we took the word for Big Garbage Can, and just slapped an -n at the end, and now we’ve got ourselves a new verb. Yes, we big garbage can! Legally! Soon. Or else.

Alright, now here’s the rest of this, which again will have nothing at all to do with containern:

• Instead I get mad at two compound words for defaming people with important jobs,
• I change the subject as quick as one moves a bodypart of your choice,
• and then I stop caring about sausage.

Who’s Ready to Learn Something Awful?

That’s right. Fun’s over. No more funny words. We are done with Handy, we are done with verscheißern, we are no longer eating clowns. Or, what, you think we’ll do those long poetic words the internet likes so much? Torschlusspanik and shit? Wanderlust? No!

Well, actually, quick fun fact—Torschlusspanik describes the fear of being too late to enjoy something, Torschluss coming from Tor (gate) and schließen (close). However, Tor is also a football goal. Or soccer. Whatever. Anyway, when I was younger I often didn’t see the L in Torschluss and read it as Torschuss, which would then be Tor (goal) and schießen (shoot, in this case score). Thought it was a word for getting nervous about scoring goals. Anyway.

Okay, now the fun’s over. I’m going to introduce a double deal of long German words, and they’re not poetic. I’ll be honest! I think they suck!

If you’re a writer or maybe an editor or have any other reason to care about page design, you may know what widows and orphans are. Or… Well, I’d hope most people know what widows and orphans are. In this context, however, they’re terms for misplaced paragraphs. Specifically, this is about how to space paragraphs at the bottom of a page, because visually, it’s not great to end nor begin a page with just one line, while the rest of the paragraph is off elsewhere.

So a widow is if most of the paragraph is at the bottom of one page, and then there’s a single lonely line at the top of the next page. That’s your widow, because she’s alone at the top. #Girlboss moment. Sorry. An orphan’s the opposite, meaning most of the paragraph being on the next page, and the single orphan line all alone at the bottom of the previous page. So, okay. Fine. I get it. I understand why they’re called that. Not great, though, right? We aren’t even talking about the German terms yet and it’s already not great.

I’m going to show you a screenshot of German OpenOffice settings. Here, look at this.

Now that’s what I call German compound words. Alright, let’s disassemble these.

Schusterjungenregelung:

Schuster = shoemaker

Junge = boy

Regelung = regulation; Regel = rule

This is the orphan one. Waisenkinderregelung is actually also a term for this, which would then just be orphan rule, but apparently, Schusterjungenregelung is more common. So it’s not usually an orphan in German. It’s the son of a shoemaker. At first I thought, huh, maybe those were particularly likely to be… orphaned? That doesn’t seem to make sense. Shoemaking is a fantastic craft, but it doesn’t sound that deadly, does it.

So, no. It’s not about being orphaned, in German. It’s because shoemaker’s sons have no manners and cut the line. It’s alone at the bottom of the page because it weaseled itself in there, because apparently that is something shoemaker’s sons do. Is that better or worse than calling it an orphan? I don’t know.

Here’s what’s definitely worse than calling something a widow: Hurenkinderregelung.

Hure = whore.

Kind means child and Regelung you already know. So… Like if you called a singular line at the top of the page a son of a bitch. Why is it called that? Wikipedia says it’s because the line has lost its origin. Since that’s apparently something that applies to children of sexworkers. Because the implication is that they wouldn’t know their fathers. Big assumption, real disrespectful to their other parent, all around bad. Stupid. Sucks.

The thing that gets me about these is that they seem fully unnecessary. I mean, I understand the quest for decent page layout. You want your text to flow well, I understand why this is an issue, generally. Just… the terms? Why do we still have these, to the point of them being used in writing programs like OpenOffice? Scroll back up, look at those words. Look how fucking long they are. And it’s just those words. I regularly forget what exactly they mean and have to go look it up again. If we’re already going to slap such long words in there, wouldn’t it be smarter to just remove the sexworker and shoemaker slander and simply put what it means. Come on. Sometimes… compound words are bad.

Well. Shoutout to sexworkers and shoemakers. I bet your kids are lovely.

Team Eye or Team Hand

Okay, I had to get that off my chest. Let’s move on. Quick! As quickly as turning your hand around.

Yeah, that’s something we say. Handumdrehen is Hand = hand (surprise!) and umdrehen meaning to turn around. Drehen is simply to turn, and the prefix um- makes it into turning around. So im Handumdrehen pretty much means within turning around a hand.

I put this term on my list of things to write about before I actually looked up its etymology, because it puzzled me. I thought there must be something more to it—why do we think of turning a hand around when something is quick? Is it something dark, was it some medieval torture technique where we twisted people’s wrists really fast?

Nope!

It’s just that: it is quick to turn your hand around. Which… Yeah, I guess! We aren’t the only language who thinks so, either: “En un tour de main” exists in French, “in een handomdraai” in Dutch, “i en handvändning” in Swedish. The English equivalent would be “in the blink of an eye,” and again, other languages agree. Italian has “in un batter d'occhio.”

And I do not say this lightly, but I kind of agree with Team Eye more here? Not only does blinking seem quicker than flipping your hand around, it’s also something people actually do. What happened in those other languages that someone was like, Oh, this was just as quick as when I turn around my hand! Which I do all the time! For reasons and purposes!

What?

We blink all the time. We know blinking’s fast, because we do it all the time. I’m blinking right now. It’s very quick. I know because I’m familiar with it. Not to mention, blinking is always fast. If you close your eyes and keep them closed for a long time, and then open them again, you didn’t blink. You closed your eyes. But if I turn my hand around really slowly, then I still turned my hand around! So, really, im Handumdrehen could mean anything.

Maybe I’m Team Hand again, actually. That sort of loophole could come in really, hehe, really… really handy.

Who Cares, Though?

I wasn’t sure if I should write about the Hurenkinder- and Schusterjungenregelung. Will it be funny, I wondered? Will people care? Do I care if it’s not funny? Do I care if people don’t care? I try to live my life in a way where I know when to stop caring about stuff that’s not important. Like if people do or don’t like my writing. If you’re still here and reading, I assume you do! Which is nice. But if people don’t, then I don’t have to care.

So that’s my very wholesome introduction to this part of the article.

There’s fun ways to say you don’t care in English. I love not giving a fuck, not giving a shit, and my personal favorite, not giving two shits. Most of yours seem kind of crude, though. There are many ways to say you don’t care in German without necessarily using swearwords.

Many, many ways.

“I don’t care” can be expressed with “ist mir egal.” Egal is probably somewhat self-explanatory as a word. You know egality, and if you don’t: it means that something is the same. So, essentially, you’re saying that it’s all the same to you.

You can tack a swear onto it. Once again, our versatile scheiß- can work here. You can say ist mir scheißegal. That would be stronger and also more aggressive.

Here’s what you can also say:

Ist mir banane. Ist mir latte. Ist mir rille. Ist mir piepe. Ist mir schnuppe. Ist mir schnurz. Ist mir wurscht. Ist mir Wurst. Ist mir bums. Ist mir Erbse. Ist mir wuppe. Ist mir wumpe. Ist mir Jacke wie Hose.

So, uh… What happened? Germany, hello? We really love not caring, huh? This is the hundreds of words for a specific part of bread all over again. My god do we love bread and not giving two shits.

Some of you may be familiar with Ist mir Wurst/wurscht. Wurscht is just a regional way of pronouncing Wurst, and Wurst means sausage. And I know there have been a couple of posts about how German people say “This is sausage to me” when they don’t care. And, yeah, we do. Nobody’s quite sure why. One theory is that it’s because both ends of a sausage look the same, so again, something is all the same to you. The other theory is that sausages were often made of throwaway meat, so you’re talking about something inconsequential in that way.

And all the other stuff? Well, I’ve tried to look some of them up. Banane, latte, rille, piepe, Erbse, wuppe, wumpe, all of those pretty much turned up nothing. Which in itself is really funny to me. At some point, Germans just started using completely random words to replace an already modified expression to say that they don’t care. It’s like if you stopped saying “I don’t give a damn/shit/fuck” and just started replacing that last word with whatever. Not even words, sometimes. Just noises. I don’t give an apple. I don’t give a whoosh. I do not give a flying sponge! I don’t give two honks about that. You should start doing that. We all should. This is so much fun.

I did find explanations for some others. Jacke wie Hose means jacket like pants. Which doesn’t seem to make sense on first glance, because those are two very different things, huh. You should put those on different parts of your body. They’re not the same, jacket and pants. However, it’s likely that it’s because suit jackets and pants are made from the same material, these days. They weren’t always, I’ve learned! But at some point they started doing that, and then it started being another case of “all the same.” So this one’s for those denim on denim wearers.

Schnurz could possibly come from “Schnarz,” which apparently is stuff like garbage, snot, and burnt-out wick. I am unclear on whether or not this word is still in use. I’ve never heard it, but those northerners say all sorts of things.

And, yeah, we have words for burnt-out wicks. Apparently! Because Schnuppe is also one. So that, too, is just another way of saying garbage, and in this case meaning something that does not matter to you.

So. Now you know a whole bunch of ways to express how little you care in German, which will, I have to assume, make you really popular here, since we love not caring so much. My personal favorite is Ist mir latte! Not really for any reason. It’s just fun to say. Aside from the Italian word, Latte is also a thin piece of wood, like a crossbar or a picket. I should be sensible and warn you that it’s also slang for a boner, but that’s not necessarily the connotation in Ist mir latte. It’s safe to use without boner thoughts! If anything, you’re expressing that you don’t care about boners. So that’s a statement.