Someone told me today that as a child she learned that the German expression for “have a nice trip” or “bon voyage” is “Gut Fahrt”, which of course is hilarious to English-speaking children. My vague memory is that in school I was taught it was “Gute Reise”. Is this a potty-mouthed urban legend, or was my curriculum sanitized? What do German people actually say?
In can be either “Gute Fahrt” or “Gute Reise”. Both are proper German. And don’t offer a “Gift” to a German, as this would be Poison. “Mist” is German for manure - If your German friend calls out “So ein Mist” he is not commenting on the weather, but calls out bullshit.
Fahrt is a rendition of the infinitive verb fahren and incorporated into fahrvergnügen. As in “Wir fahr’n fahh’n fahr’n auf der Autobahn” (Kraftwerk) or the Volkswagen commercials.
Yes, I know enough German to see that the expression makes sense, I was just wondering if it’s the one in common usage.
All answers and cultural references are correct. Fahrt, as AHunter3 wrote, comes from the verb fahren, which is anything you do on wheels and some more because languages are complicated: you may whish Gute Fahrt! when somebody is taking or about to take a train, riding (or about to ride) a bicicle, driving (you get the general idea) a car or a motorcycle… etc. Gute Überfahrt would be used when somebody is about too board a ship that crosses some body of water. Gute Abfahrt is said before somebody goes down a slope on skis. Guten Flug! means “have a nice flight”, Guten Ritt! means “may you not fall off that horse!” (more or less).
Gute Reise just means “have a nice journey”; there is simply no reference to the mode of transport there.
And Fart de Ski is French for ski wax.
I recall seeing the sign for hidden driveways, Achtung Ausfahrt, while driving in rural Switzerland. To me, it sounded hilarious.
Just dropping in to point out that the two are, in fact, etymologically related. They both go back to a Germanic root (present in both German and English) meaning “to give”. From that sense, it was used to refer to a dose of a drug that would be administered to a person; and from there, “Gift” acquired its modern German meaning of “poison”.
The one that I always notice (and worry that it might cause confusion at an inopportune time) is “Notausgang”, which an English speaker might read as “No Exit” when in fact it means “Emergency Exit”.
Yeah, the regular sign for “Exit” reads “Ausfahrt” on the (German) Autobahn, and I have read about people from abroad wondering where this magic city of “Ausfahrt” is located.
See referances to Exit/Ausfahrt in Are You Being Served.
Heheh, NOMEANSNO titled one of their records All Roads Lead to Ausfahrt
Sounds like a good name for a character in a Mel Brooks film.
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I do motorcycle tours with an Austrian based company (Edelweiss Bike Travel) and can attest to decals affixed to their bikes and vans that read “Gute Fahrt”. It’s kind of funny as all of their tours guides are at least bilingual (English/German) so they all know the English words
That was the reason that the Rolls Royce Silver Shadow wasn’t called Silver Mist as planned. Luckily, one guy in the Rolls Royce marketing team knew a little German and made the others aware that the name would cause problems on the German market.