We have a similar concept here, though the actual term for it isn’t fixed. This year, for instance, we called it “May”.
Deadbeat or slacker might work. I mean, they don’t work, but the words might.
I’m sure you didn’t mean to imply that, but of course schießen and stechen are normal German verbs, they just can’t be used in the sense of “shooting and hitting someone, result unstated”. You can of course say “he shot at somebody”, but that doesn’t specify if he hit or not.
I’ve taken a couple of words from my mother’s Low German because they don’t really have an English counterpart - vavinksh, meaning some physical thing that is out of true, bent, half-broken, crooked, and ferschlook, which means choking on your own spit.
Used in sentences: That old bench is vavinksh.
Gah! I just ferschlook myself! Cough, cough.
ETA: I meant to mention English language constructions like “like like” - “Hey, Anne, Brad likes you!” “You mean like like?” “Yeah!”
English has millions of words–almost all of them; the exception is rare I’d say–that has more than one meaning, or at least more than one shade of meaning. “Mercenary” and “hispanic” very definitely have definitions. They just have more than one.
I think *chutzpah *is originally Yiddish.
I completely forgot about davka! Hahaha.
But the Hebrew word I STILL want to use when speaking English - even though my Hebrew skills have completely gone to shit - is balegan. English just doesn’t have a word that encapsulates that sense of “chaotic, annoying situation that fucked up my plans.”
“I was going to go out but then there was this *balegan *at work and I couldn’t get out.”
“Traffic was such a *balegan *today.”
Upon realizing [del]I[/del] you need to read two hundred pages of academic reading for school tomorrow: “Ezeh balegan!”
Aside: I have no idea how to spell it, but my mom goes with something that sounds like fuhrhunnoxed for confused. I try to use it and people say, oh flummoxed? and it really is the same thing so it would be pretentious to say it her way. :smack: We’ll keep in the family I guess.
I humbly submit the Finnish concept of sisu. A Finnish friend of mine described it as “when your last milking cow has died, when you’re out of vodka, your toes are turning black from the cold and you can see the Russians come up the hill… sisu is what makes you go on. It’s our inner fuck you.”
(No offense to Russians, of course. We were talking about how the Winter Warillustrated what sisu means.)
Here’s a word I’ve never heard outside of my little corner of Mississippi: the tuh-dun-ta-dun. If you’re a little bit sick, but it’s mostly the lazy ass, you’ve got the tuh-dun-ta-dun.
I think we do…the word is cow. It just happens to be the same word as for the female of the species. Similarly, duck, goose and dog have gender-specific variations, but also generically refer to the species.
American English seems to not have a word for American English.
I remember reading in an Alan Watts book about the Japanese word for an emotion - yugen - for which there is no English translation. He described it use thusly: “Yugen is to watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds.”
I suppose it depends on where you live and what you do. Around here, and throughout the cattle ranching trade, a single bovine raised for food is called a beef (the plural is “beeves”).
'Merican?
As in “'Merican? DO YOU SPEAK IT?”
I was going to start a thread about this but it’ll do posting it here I hope. When I was last in America I heard the term “nigger rich”, meaning as I took it, someone who say wins $1,000 in the Lottery and blows it all on something stupid, swiftly. It is a reprehensible, vile term for obvious reasons but is there a polite equivalent? Someone has suggested “ghetto rich” but I think that still has a racist air about it.
Sure we do. Have you never heard anyone say “Talk American”?