I actually liked her, and it’s kind of disappointing to find out she may not have been that fluent. I took another year, but we got a new teacher who turned out to be a real ditz with a throat condition. (She frequently cleared her throat like a rheumy wino, and she once did it while we were all on headphones. HRRRCCCKK right in our ear holes.)
IIRC (which I probably don’t), we were getting “llorar” and “llover” confused. One means “to cry,” and the other means “to rain.” She said “I can see how you’re getting them confused. Crying and raining are sort of the same.”
My classmate turned to me and said “Look, it’s crying outside. Oh, you look sad. Why are you raining?”
Yeah, i certainly didn’t mean to imply the word meant “chicken”, or that Germans don’t use the word for lard. Just that I’m pretty sure “schmaltz” was a common word in Yiddish that referred (in Yiddish) to a food Jews ate.
I don’t think “elope” in English would ever be used to mean “kidnapped.” It only refers to an action voluntary on the part of both partners. And I’ve never heard/seen it used for anything other than going off to get married; though it’s used both for the type of marriage for which an escape is necessary, and for one in which the couple just goes off and gets married without a ceremony involving or prior notification to friends and family, but without any need for an escape, at least unless what’s being escaped is all the commotion that often leads up to and surrounds weddings.
If this very special meaning is the only one that applies to “elope”, than @Pardel-Lux is right that there’s also no equivalent word in German. Sure “miteinander durchbrennen”, as he noted, implies a similar meaning, but it can also apply to people who flee to just live somewhere else without getting married. Also, you can singly “durchbrennen”, it can describe a teenager fleeing from home for instance.
That’s interesting. In caló (the language of Spanish gypsies), brigindar means to rain and brigindona (with the augmentative -ona) means onion.
In Spanish, cizaña has a few meanings:
Darnel (Lolium temulentum), a weed that grows in wheatfields and makes you sick if you eat it, which used to happen thousands of years ago. It’s the plant referred to in the New Testament’s parable of the weeds, and I’d like to think it’s behind the name of the character Darnell from My Name Is Earl.
Vice among virtues (so maybe “defect” in English).
Something that spoils or ruins something else. With the verbs meter (insert) and sembrar (plant, sow), it refers to evil-minded behavior that ruins or spoils someone’s future, project, morning, etc. For example, giving someone bad advice as a practical joke or dropping a comment like “Someone called you a jerk the other day, but I can’t tell you who it was.” There’s not really a word for that in English, is there? As a noun, “sneaky troublemaker” is all I’m coming up with, but I’m guessing there are other ways to say it, especially as an inside joke within a family, company, school, etc.
That word is particularly special as an English example of infixation (though, technically, it’s tmesis.) Infixation occurs most commonly in Austroasiatic languages. English does do that rarely, – you are correct --but the examples given by Maserschmidt are pretty standard compounds. German will stack them a lot deeper than English will, for sure. English doesn’t go more than two words deep, typically. But in the example given, there’s nothing foreign to us – we do that with the “scheiss” example sometimes ourselves: “shitstorm, shitlist, shithead”, for example.
Ah yes, the Germans much prefer the swear word “scheiss” as opposed to “fick”.
I have a book entitled They have a Word for It. It’s a whole book of foreign words with no English single word translation.
I like “huahponopono”. (sp?) It’s Hawaiian, (or maybe another Pacific Island language) and it means to lock two feuding groups into a room and refuse to let them out until they reach some sort of agreement to end the feud.
Just think what that could do if we could apply it to Congress!
“Elope” in English doesn’t always mean to run away and get married. Apparently, the original meaning in English was “to escape” or “to run away” and it is still used that way in contexts having nothing to do with marriage - a person “escapes” from a prison or jail, but “elopes” from a juvenile detention facility, a group home , a psychiatric facility, a nursing home etc.,
That’s interesting. I personally have never heard usages like that (I would use “escaped from” in all cases), and it would confuse me, but now that I know, hopefully I’ll remember. The only context I’ve ever heard it in is marriage.
It’s not a usage most people would have heard - you’d either have to be in a line of work like mine where you deal with those institutions or be close to someone who eloped from one of them . I was definitely confused the first time I got a phone call saying a 14 year old on my caseload eloped ( from a group home).
Does “finicky” have a direct translation in other languages? I barely know how to define it in English–I’d say it means something like “picky” or “particular” or "fussy’ but there’s more there than just those synonyms–it implies a difficult personality, I think, maybe a deliberately annoying kind of person. How do other languages translate “finicky”?
Do you know someone who had to escape from someplace in order to get married, Romeo-and-Juliet or Tristan-and-Isolde style? I know people who got married in a different jurisdiction because it was more convenient, or on holiday, but the former scenario sounds whack.
I am familiar from literature with the practice of deloping, which in a mortal duel is considered not cool. Does that translate into German, Russian, etc?
It’s Afrikaans.
The first expression is Cape Flats dialect, not general Afrikaans. And it’s not one word, it’s two : “voetjies hang”. Idiomatically it can refer to a toddler who just want to drive not walk (so their legs dangle) but that’s a dated usage from when cars were a luxury - nowadays, it much more refers to someone always being the passenger in someone else’s ride. A hanger-on. A scrub, if you will.
It has quite the opposite meaning in general Afrikaans, more like “to chill out” (literally “put up your feet”), you’ll see holiday beach houses with the name as one word (no hyphen).
But snotklap is quite universal.
Which Bantu language? There’s no such language as “Bantu”.
This is one of those expressions that I can only ever find in lists of expressions like these, or articles clearly derived from them, but not in any actual dictionaries. For instance, neither of those words occur in Swahili, the only real Bantu language that expression is linked with.
I got the term from the aforementioned “They Have A Word For It!” book by Howard Rheingold. Funny that to this day, people enjoy yanking the chains of anthropologists and ethnographers.
Is it used by the people who do it? It just be the staff? And does it actually mean they ran away?
I think of “elope” as a common word meaning “to run off and get married without a wedding, possibly against the wishes of the family”. I have never heard it used in any other way. And all the people i know who eloped did it to escape the wedding, not because anyone would have tried to prevent them from marrying. And in two cases, it failed, and they got dragged into a giant wedding later…
Actually, in one case the parents might have disapproved.