Like turning an object on a lathe?
Yes, what you do with a lathe is called drehen in German, except when you do it with a wooden object (less frequently also for horn, ivory, amber, alabaster, soapstone, serpentinite, acrylic glass (Plexiglas) and other plastics), in this case it is called drechseln (pronounced more or less drex-eln).
In fact, a lathe is called a Drehmaschine in German. What else?
Isn’t there also the occupational surname Drechsler? I’ve also seen the shorter, Anglicized variant Drexel. The equivalent occupational surname in English, though not a cognate, is Turner.
Sure, with several orthographic variants, as usual. If you are into football you may remember Julian Draxler, I guess he is related to drechseln too.
The German word for “torque” is “drehmoment”.
Diverging a bit (OK, a lot):
Engineers commonly use the English word “moment” by itself to mean torque, but TIL that that’s actually a more generic term in physics referring to the mathematical product of distance (raised to some power) and some other physical quantity:
In the proper name “ith moment of j”, the value of i is the exponent applied to distance. So the full descriptive name of torque is “first moment of force”, meaning the exponent on distance is 1: T = F * D1. Similarly, the mass moment of inertia for a rotating object is properly called “second moment of inertia”, which means the exponent on distance is 2: I = r2*m. I don’t remember being taught that formal/broad meaning of “moment” in my engineering classes all those years ago.
Another famous athlete with a variant of that name is Heike Drechsler, two time Olympic champion in the long jump.
yesterday, 94% of Chile were without electricity for 6-10 hours …
details are not quite clear yet, it seems like a fault protection mechanism activated erroniously (false positive) and took a line that transports 25% of Chile’s electricity to the south (south in this case starts about 2000km NORTH of Santiago) - and given that there was no transmission line, all other producers of electricity had to take their production off-line …
well… much chaos ensued. The Metro in Stgo was stopped, millions had to find alternative ways to get home (many of them walking 10+km!)
yep the structural problem of an energy-grid in a country with a 40:1 aspect ratio …
(anybody has any knowledge of what happens to a powerstation when it can’t carry off the produced energy? … how does the energy get “dumped” ultra-short-time?) … I assume short-middle-time there are some sort of “idle” mechanisms in a gas- or windturbine, solar park, etc…
Turns out (no pun intended) “dreidel”, a kid’s spinning toy, is cognate with drehen.
And another variant it ‘Trexler,’ which shows up in my family tree a few generations back.
The simple act of throwing an object, especially a handheld object for distance, fundamentally involves at least a partial rotation of the entire body. Given also the usual arm motion for such a hurl, it makes a lot of sense that a verb meaning “to rotate, to turn, to twist” morphed a bit into “to throw”.
in old viennes dialect: a Drahdiwaberl (dreh dich, weibchen) … I am sure 90% of the sub 20ies in Vienna would not understand that …
also a rather important proto-anarcho-punky band in the 80ies in Vienna - out of which, Falco came …
cant edit b/c of YT … dreh-dich-weiberl … is translated rotate, girly / twist, gal - as those things were often female shaped, being gedrechselt and all that
I went to high school with someone whose family name was Traxler.
But no connection to the rotary device Dremel tool. Inventor Albert Dremel’s name is from Middle High German for club, stick, etc.
Turner halls were gymnastics clubs where political activity also took place. This created trouble in 1848, but German immigrants brought them to many towns and cities in the US
Today, by random chance, I happened to learn the German word for morning wood.
The interesting fact about it — the word is gendered as feminine.
“Die Morgenlatte.”
Which is definitely not something you want to order at Starbuck’s.
Or, well, maybe you do. Just leave me out of it.
It can be feminine in Spanish too, depending what term you use, I can’t recall a slang term for it, but “Ereccion matutina” (“morning erection”) is feminine.
“Latte”, cognate with “lath”, a thin strip of wood (as in “lath and plaster walls”). Makes sense.
Thank God! I thought it might refer to “morning milk”. Yuck!
“Latte” means a wooden board (so it’s related to morning “wood”), but is also slang for an erection like “boner”.
ETA: as an aside: another slang word for erection is “Steifen”, which just means “stiff one”. There’s a cult Schlager parody singer with the stage name of Christian Steiffen, which is a homophone of “Krist ja’n Steifen”, which means “Hey, you get a boner!” in North German dialect.
And in Catalan it is called (among other things) la trempera matinera, which was the title of a song by a crazy band about 40 or 50 years ago, La Trinca. Here is the video. Of course it is feminine too. The text was very simple, it went like: The morning erection is not a proper erection, it’s just that you have to pee. Again and again, with a Cuban rythm. Well, more or less. It was a great hit back then.
Now I am wondering about what you mean by “random chance”, leaving apart the fact that it is nice example of a pleonasm.
BTW: I say that again, and it bears repeating: If only people would understand the difference between (biological) sex and (grammatical) gender and that they have nothing to do with each other the political discourse would often be much less acrimonious.