German Fun

I have a daily calendar that has bits and pieces of Onion stories. Here’s the one from Monday:

What Are We Feeling That Would Be Better Expressed In German?

1. Dread of something inevitable yet benign:
Fuerchtenünabwendbarfreundlich

2. The wish to see all suffer for the crimes of one:
Schadenallemeinverbrechen

3. Laughter at something one knows in one’s soul is not funny:
Lachenaüfkomishsnichtspaßheit

4. Shame over eating last piece of Black Forest cherry cake:
Schwarzschamekirshkuchenessen

This entry was written by Bryan Forbes, posted on February 23, 2005 at 12:53 pm, filed under General. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

5 Comments

  1. frank
    Posted February 23, 2005 at 1:38 pm | Permalink

    well the composite nouns they fabricated there are mostly gibberish. But I suppose a little funny ;)

  2. sdf
    Posted February 23, 2005 at 3:03 pm | Permalink

    none of these words make any sense in german. someone had a little fun with babelfish, it seems.

    eg, in number 4:
    - "black forest cherry cake" is translated wrong (correct: schwarzwälder kirschtorte)
    - shame is wrong (schame isn’t german)
    - miracle of miracles: they got "eating" right (essen).

    you can have fun with german composite words. this is not an example.

  3. Tim Fuchs
    Posted February 23, 2005 at 3:22 pm | Permalink

    This studd doesn’t really make any sense, does it? I try to translate back to englisch:

    1. Dreadinevitablefriendly
    2. Harmallmycrime
    3. Laughonweirdnotfunnieness
    4. Black?????eatcherrycake

    None of the initial english sentences can be expressed with a german word I think, so this isn’t really funny.

  4. sdf
    Posted February 23, 2005 at 3:33 pm | Permalink

    an old example of how long german composite nouns can get is "Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitänsmützenknopf", which means "button on the cap of a steamboat captain on the danube"

    still not really funny, but at least correct.

  5. BD
    Posted February 23, 2005 at 11:32 pm | Permalink

    Though living in northern germany and being a native german, I even had problems understanding the nouns at first glance. So people shouldn’t take these words for german at all…Especially since the spelling is horrible…

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