For notifications of new posts on language, translation, energy and culture, you can subcribe to our blog, with comments and discussion of articles very welcome on our social media accounts.
Woman reflecting with eyes closed

Vorfreude – looking forward to joy

/in , , /by

Woman reflecting with eyes closed

Can you cheer yourself up by focusing on the joy of future fun? Or do you worry, and worry about worry? And do you enjoy worrying? Germans have a nice word for a forward-looking joy, Vorfreude, to describe the feeling of anticipating something you’ll enjoy.

Most of us daydream of holidays and meals and pleasurable events to come, and psychologists even say that is good for us and a helpful practice for lifting your mood, rather than an idle waste of time.  So perhaps we’ll soon start talking about a pleasant daydream as a vorfreudian foreshadowing or a  key part of the psychological practice of Vorfreudianism, though that almost sounds like a blending of Freudian analytical thought with the mechanistic production approach of Fordism, a term originating from the factories of Henry Ford.   Bring on an assembly line for positive thoughts in the unconscious mind! Or could this be a conveyor belt of fears? An American company actually has a UK trademark on the word Vorfreude, for the sole purpose of selling mops! Perhaps customers look forward to mopping up problems…Continue reading full article…

Rock concert in a cabbage

How cabbages rocked the world – the Krautrock explosion

/in , , /by

Have rocking cabbages changed modern pop? What is the sound of a cabbage singing, or a broccoli beat? In the German language Kraut means simply cabbage or herb, but in the early 1970s the English speaking world enthusiastically imported the sound of Krautrock. Critics of the day gave this new avant-garde West German genre the ironic name Krautrock and the name stuck, and so did the music, growing to become hugely influential. Did the critics mean to say this was vegetable music, like that of the Austrian Vegetable Orchestra? Not really, because since the end of the First World War Kraut has been a pejorative term in English for a German, supplanting earlier terms and possibly reflecting German fondness for eating sauerkraut, so the Krautrock neologism served both to describe and also mock experimental West German electro pop music of the 1960s and 1970s.
Continue reading full article…

Kursaal building

The forgotten Kursaal – cure-all or curse for chancers and dancers?

/in , /by

Before the days of wild swimming and thalassotherapy, taking the waters meant going to a posh spa for a cure using the mineral springs and thermal baths found there, with the Kursaal being a focal point. In nineteenth century Europe spas, often called thermal baths, were elite hotspots with ballrooms, promenades, Kursaal buildingand also casinos allowing visitors to take a bath in the financial sense. Spas were even haunts for artists, among them renowned Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky who lost money and found inspiration to write his novel The Gambler at Baden Baden in Germany, Europe’s foremost spa at the time. Surprisingly, contemporary medicine does now find real benefits to water therapies and bathing for a number of conditions, and the spa at Bath in England was found to effect real cures, possibly of conditions caused by lead poisoning.

Continue reading full article…

Smiling emoji with music headphones

Where do earworms come from?

/in , /by

Smiling emoji with music headphones
Almost everyone has had an earworm in their head at some time and tried to get it out, but where do they come from? Germany? The term earworm originated in German over a hundred years ago and entered English as a literal translation of the German word Ohrwurm, or ear-worm, which Germans used to describe a catchy tune caught in one’s head.

Continue reading full article…

Masked doctor with hypodermic for injection

Boos, boosts and booze infuse German news – English word boostern wins a prize

/in , , /by

Masked doctor with hypodermic for injectionThe English word boostern has just won a coveted prize, unexpectedly being chosen as Germany’s 2021 Anglicism of the year after going viral in Germany – despite not being an English word. How did this happen?

The English verb to boost means to assist or encourage something to grow or rise, and also serves as a noun meaning something which, usually deliberately, helps something else increase or rise. So the space race saw the introduction of booster rockets, and child car safety regulations saw the introduction of booster seats to raise small children to the minimum height for safety belts. But boosting also has a more political and ambiguous dimension dating to nineteenth century North America, yet resonating in the scandals in the UK in 2022.Continue reading full article…

Diagram of the Agile method

What is agile today ?

/in , , /by

How agile are you? Or rather, how agile is your company, and what does that mean today if you are not professional steeplejacks?  It is curious how this term became such a ubiquitous buzzword, as some find themselves thinking they need to race to catch up with a speeding trend, rather than risk being left behind and seen as clumsy or unbalanced.

A Management Today Words-Worth piece by John Morrish examined the question and indeed the word itself:Continue reading full article…

Person staring into distance on beach

Naming that indescribable ache to be somewhere else: Fernweh in days of lockdown

/in , , /by
magical misty seascape

Dreaming of faraway lands

Many of those locked away in long days of lockdown feel an indescribable ache to be someplace else, not just anywhere, somewhere nice and new and interesting. The German language already has a precise word for that aching far away feeling, and the German word has lately been been filling a void in the English language: Fernweh.

Fernweh isn’t just a case of “Get me out of here” or “Beam me up Scotty” or a desire to be nowhere at all, it’s a longing for faraway places that erase the ache and relieve the longing, and so the word is used in German travel adverts and even printed prominently on brands of activity clothing.Continue reading full article…

Glass of mulled wine and pinecones

Glugging glue wine as Christmas comes unstuck

/in , , /by

Glass of mulled wine and pineconesDon’t sniff, but are spicy Brits glugging glue this Christmas? Bountiful bottles of Glühwein selling from UK supermarket shelves might suggest people who come unstuck in extended isolation are reaching for a remedy or trying to put a broken Christmas back together, but in fact this import is the traditional German equivalent of mulled wine, also known as spiced wine, and has no known connection to glue. A humble red wine heated with cinnamon, cloves, allspice, nutmeg and even raisins is a widespread winter drink in Europe and nicely disposes of otherwise undrinkable dregs of cheap wine. Although traditionally this potion goes by different names in different lands, now in English it is flirting with a hot new name from abroad, and we are provisionally adding it to our growing list of German words used in English.
Continue reading full article…

Hamster with hazelnuts

Happy hamsters squirrel away supermarket stocks

/in , , , /by

Hamster with hazelnutsHamsters have been emptying shop shelves across Germany and now seem set to cross borders as other countries take up the telling term Hamsterkauf. Wise advice to stock up on essentials before being confined to home by an anti-coronavirus diktat, combined with an angst attack in the face of a pandemic, has seen runs on toilet paper, pasta, flour and hand gel – snatching away all available wares. The German language term for this buying more than you need is Hamsterkauf, meaning literally hamster buying, or buying like a hamster. The tiny hamster with its puffy cheeks full of nuts is a lovable symbol for sensibly storing what you need for later, like its bigger cousin the squirrel, but neither actually pay for what they accumulate and have never been seen panic buying.Continue reading full article…

Three unicorns running

Unicorn Bets Set in Race to Carbon Zero

/in , , , /by

Are capitalists hoping to harness unicorns to lead the charge to a zero carbon economy? Some experts think so and are calling for investment in unicorn incubation programmes with the promise of great returns. Recently the unicorn has lent its name to the elite group of billion dollar startup tech firms, and now looks set to sire a whole new breed of firms focused on facilitating low carbon living. As icecaps melt, sea levels rise, and global overheating threatens human extinction, can a magical horse with a pointed hat save the human race? Some hard-headed technologists are advocating this, so is it time we understood this beautiful beast and its future a bit better?

Three unicorns runningThe unicorn has captured the human imagination since the earliest days of India, appears in the Christian Bible, in medieval bestiary books illustrating beasts of every alleged kind, and has often been harnessed as a symbol. Typically understood to be a forest-dwelling white horse with a single, spiralling and pointed horn sticking out of its forehead, it might initially have been the ancients’ remote misinterpretation of actual one-horned animals such as the ibex or rhinoceros, or of profile representations of cattle, but it developed a mythical presence in the Middle Ages in Europe which lives on to this day.

Continue reading full article…