[in the silence between words]

[kaberett]

There are some terms I don't have good English for, either because I don't know the word or I don't think the English is as good as the German so I don't bother remembering it. Here are some of the things I am most likely to say:

Basta, fertig. Enough, finished, sufficient, done.

Biomull. Green waste/compost/recycling. Usually used when I am helping with cooking and therefore asking what to do with vegetable odds and ends.

Egal. Yes, French via German; lit "equal"; used as the shortest way available to me of communicating "I have no preference between the options you have offered me".

Falsch! Lit wrong/incorrect; muttered at myself when I've made a mistake.

Erstens braucht es immer länger zweitens als man denkt. First: it will always take twice as long as you think. Only with a nicer play on the numbers.

Spatzen. Lit sparrows; more helpfully, this appears to be a local dialect term that probably wasn't only used by my grandmother in the 50s, which seems as of late to be called "delayed onset muscle soreness" in some varieties of English.

Ein/der Teufel sitzt darauf. There's a devil sitting on it, or the Devil is sitting on it: of something that is lost or mislaid, causing strife and frustration and anxiety.

Unterlag. Lit "underlay"; specifically, the thing you put hot pans etc on top of to protect the table/worksurface.

Was man nicht in Kopf hat, muß man in den Füßen haben. Lit "what one does not have in one's head, one must have in one's feet"; more helpfully to Anglophones, expanded as "if you don't remember to bring it with you, you have to go back and fetch it", usually muttered to myself in exasperation as I disappear into another room to fetch something I failed to bring with last time I was there. When directed at other people it is done with affection and sympathy. (I have the regional variant that uses "feet"; other variants use "legs".)

Ich bin ganz satt, ich mag' kein Blatt me-e-e-ehr. I'm stuffed - I couldn't eat another leaf. (It's funny because you say the last word like a goat bleating.)

Immer aufhören wenn's am Besten schmeckt. Always stop eating when it tastes the best.

Wer nicht kommt zur rechten Zeit musst essen wass da Übrig bleibt. If you don't arrive on time for dinner, you get to eat the leftovers.

(There are others, of course, but these are the most common.)

Comments

[kaberett]

Yeah, "ist mir egal" is the long version and not one I ever say (... except that I apparently lapse into Swiss pronunciation when I do, huh).

Re "trivet" - some English-speakers have told me that strictly it's only accurate if it has three leg-y bits???

also *g*

re: trivet legs

[quartzpebble]

Whaa? Not in my dialect.

Re: trivet legs

[jesse_the_k]

In our house the flat kind are simply, "hot pad"

Re: trivet legs

[cadenzamuse]

Yep, for me "trivet" = any wooden one, and metal or ceramic ones with legs. At the very least it's got to be chunky to be a trivet.

And the rest are "hot pads." (Trivets are a subset of hot pads.)

[redsixwing]

...huh. The flat ceramic ones are "trivet" in my house, too.
For that matter, so is the woven pine-needle one, which is about as far from the metal be-legged ones as it's possible to get while retaining the same general function.

"Coaster" works too, but has more of a connotation of the thing you put under drinks to keep condensation from dripping on things.

[kaberett]

Yes, I think "coaster" is definitely a drinks mat (which leads to hilarious tautology when "drinks coaster" BUT O WELL).

[redsixwing]

Similarly I keep laughing at "Table Mesa," which is a place I used to live.