Hello everyone,
and welcome to our German Word of the Day. This time we’ll haft a look at the meaning of
have
Oh wait, I mixed it up. How stupid of me. I meant to say we’ll haft a look at the meaning of
hav… crap, AGAIN!
What’s that?
A siren.
Oh no, it’s the Bad Intro Police! They’re coming to arrest me. No fair! I ain’t going back to jail. I’m gonna hide inside the look at the meaning of
haft
Quick, follow me…
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what is the difference between festnehmen and verhaften. Is it the way the arrest is physically handled?
thanks
There’s no difference to me, actually.
“verhaften” sounds a bit rougher, but that’s just the sound of the word, not how it’s done.
I don’t think there’s a difference even in official police speak.
great post! I love learning while having a good laugh! Emanuel, you are awesome!
Das ist der Plan :)!
aaron | September 6, 2017 at 4:39 pm | Reply
Mir ist inzwischen eingefallen, dass -haftig vielleicht von -haftigkeit kommt und lässt einfach ein Adjektiv aus einem Nomen mit der Endung -haftigkeit bilden?
es gibt den “Leibhaftigen”, den dessen Namen nicht genannt werden soll…. ;-)
(den Teufel…)
Andersrum. “-haftigkeit” kommt von “-haftig” :)
Emanuel
Can you check that this is on your word lists please. I couldn’t find it.
cheers
Steve
Hello. Thanks for a great post,as usual. Re the Muttiheft, I was a teacher and a parent of school-age children. In Britain communication between parent and school happens in the children’s homework diary, unless it’s something requiring more urgency or aavdiscretion. The diary is signed weekly by the parent and checked by the teacher, so it would be clear that the message had been seen
Yeah, that sounds exactly like a Muttiheft :)
Ich bin dem Wort “leibhaftig” in einem Buch begegnet und konnte dessen Bedeutung aufgrund der Bedeutung von -haft herauskriegen. Allerdings scheint -haftig seltener als -haft vorzukommen. Ich habe bloß 4 Vorkommen im Wörterbuch gefunden – leibhaftig, schattenhaftig, unwahrhaftig und wahrhaftig. Gibt es weitere?
Mir ist inzwischen eingefallen, dass -haftig vielleicht von -haftigkeit kommt und lässt einfach ein Adjektiv aus einem Nomen mit der Endung -haftigkeit bilden?
Nee, -haftigkeit wird von -haftig gebildet, nicht andersrum :)
Nee, mir fallen auch keine ein. Und “schattenhaftig” hab’ ich auch noch nie gehört, eher “schattenhaft”.
I have never heard of “Muttiheft” used here in Berlin. Where I work they all say, “Mitteilungsheft” In Engl. I would say, “communication book” or “information book”.
Maybe it’s a GDR thing :). Are you a teacher?
I’ve always wondered what exactly “herzhaft” means – other Anglophones can chime in here, but to me “hearty” doesn’t sound so much like a description of flavor as one of… I don’t know, texture or something. Like, it’s typical to refer to stew as “hearty,” which might involve it being flavorful, but to me it mostly sounds like it’s warm and filling, thick rather than soupy. Hearty food is comfort food.
My sense of “herzhaft” is something like “savory,” in contrast to sweetness. But then, “greasy” would probably often be a component of “hearty,” so I don’t know.
Maybe it’s in between savory and hearty. Savory for the mere description of taste and hearty for the feeling attached. “Herzhaft” does have a vibe of warming, strengthening, nourishing to it, that savory lacks because it’s so technical (to my ears, anyway)
Off topic but I really have to ask:
today, I was listening to NPRs (the1a, to be precise) and the host said this:
– “What produces the most angst, what makes the parents freaked the most out…”
I was baffled at “freaked the most out”. The speaker is American native speaker with no knowledge of German. Is that phrasing a slip of the tongue, or just rare, or even common? Thanks a lot!!
“Freak out” started in the drug slang of the 60s. It involved irrational behavior or emotional instability, possibly panic, or even disconnection from reality, like on LSD. Now it has come to mean losing emotional control due to excitement, shock, fear, joy, despair, etc. It’s very often used negatively, as in “Don’t freak out, man!”
It has also been over-used somewhat, so the original extreme meaning has been softened quite a bit. “Don’t freak out!”, at least as far as I have seen, is most often a dismissal of someone’s objections to something, usually directed at parents. It can also be used to describe one’s reaction to some unusual, usually negative event. “Seeing my friend laying there unconscious freaked me out.” “I was freaked out by all the cockroaches we found under the sink.”
I have no idea how common it is, but it’s still around. “Freaked the most out” is an unusual wording, but most N Americans would know what the speaker was referring to.
What struck me is that it is how a German would say it. It’s like having a prefix at the end. How does “freaked the most out” compare to “freaked quickly out”. How wrong does either one sound?
It would sound odd to me – I’d assume it was a slip of the tongue, and that the speaker meant “makes the parents the most freaked out.”
That said, there’s one parallel to that construction that is idiomatic (if very colloquial and vulgar): “freak(ed) the [expletive] out.” Not that I’m suggesting an NPR host would ever have subconsciously wanted to say “what makes the parents freak the f*** out”…
“Freaked the most out” is really awkward sounding. If I had to compose that sentence, I would have said, “…what makes the parents freak out the most”. Note my switch to the infinitive, which works better in the subordinate clause (or whatever it’s called). Same with “freaked quickly out” – it isn’t as awkward as the other one, but still off. It sounds much more natural to have the adverb before or after this set phrase, as in “freaked out quickly” or “quickly freaked out”.
So, it would seem that you could insert a direct object between ‘freak’ and ‘out’, but nothing else. I think the speaker just tripped over his tongue and did the best he could to recover it. :-)
I love how your discussions draw my attention to the quirky bits of English.
RuthE my concern here is that you use ‘laying’ rather than ‘lying’.Was your friend an unconscious hen?
Haha! Could have gone either way, Otto. I have yet to keep those straight. :-D
Good morning everyone. I am a student from Taiwan. Thanks to German is easy community so that I am able to learn with the website without putting pressure on my father. Have a good day learning German!
The Muttiheft sounds like a great idea, but I’ve never heard of it here in North America. (I’ve been around a while, and my mother was a school teacher. :-) ) I did a Google search and didn’t come up with anything similar. There are regular parent-teacher conferences, but they’re done in person. These days something like the Muttiheft would give the district lawyer apoplexy. I suppose they could do it on line with passwords.
Thank you for this one. I had never gotten the heft/haft connection before, and you’ve expanded heft for me as well.
Hope your vacation went well.
Something similar is, or was, used in Australia (at least some of it), but only for children with identified problems. I can only recall hearing such a thing called a “communication book”. All children having a Muttiheft sounds much kinder, though I wonder if anyone feels the need to call it something different to avoid upsetting any children without mothers on hand. That would surely happen here, even if Mutti is thought of as referring to the book rather than its reader.
“All children having a Muttiheft sounds much kinder”..
That sentence really had me confused for a second :D. I was like “children sounds children??”
Also, very good point of you to raise awareness of the discriminatory nature of “Muttiheft” ;). I guess, Elternheft would be the proper 2017 choice. Or better yet, “Erziehungsberechtigtenheft”, because that then includes kids raised by grandparents or uncles and aunts or orphans.
Well, you know what they say: no matter how kind your children are, German children will always be Kinder.
I’m pretty much with RuthE here – it’s just unknown in the US, as far as I know. (Like the Mutterpass, which we discovered through having a child in Berlin.) I guess something like “parent-teacher notebook” would be comprehensible and a little shorter, but that’s about the best I can do.
Wow, I just found that “Muttiheft” actually has an entry in Wikipedia… the ENGLISH one XD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muttiheft
Long time reader, first time subscriber! Wanted to stop in and say hi, and say that I love your pieces on verb prefixes. Nothing has helped expand my foundation than hearing a german speaker explain the logic behind the grammar. Vielen Dank!
Cool freut mich zu hören :). Danke für das tolle Feedback!
Of no significance to haft, but being an inveterate nitpicker I can’t let your comment about “h” in a Russian accent pass without comment.
There actually is no “h” in Russian so it’s unsurprising that Russian pronunciation of “h” in other languages tends to be different. In Russian versions of foreign names with “h” either “g” (Г} or “kh” (X) is used instead. Mostly “g” I think. Russian Wikipedia has Frans Hals as Франс Халс, with a “kh”. The Russian writer Alexander Herzen is Ге́рцен in Russian, with a “g”. German Titov, second human to orbit earth, could, and perhaps should, be rendered as Herman(n) in English. ….
Thanks for another fascinating post including another little physics joke. :)
Ah, that’s interesting. I didn’t know Russian had no “h”. I just thought they have this very “chard” way of saying it. Thanks for the insights :). Do you speak Russian?
Not really, beyond formulaic pleasantries and expressions of ignorance, but I am intrigued by it.
I’ve now also found Heinrich Heine and Hermann Hesse on Bикипедия (Wikipedia). They both get the full “g” treatment.
Heavy was used like crazy, intense or awesome in the 70’s. Funny how it uses two of the haft meanings. And I might want a second opinion on the Haftnotiz example. :) And thank you to everybody again for the free membership that lets me be here!
Wait, which two meanings does it use :)?
Sorry. I meant that you say one meaning to mean another. And the connection is not obvious.
i know a song in german, it goes something like this: “du bist verhaftet wegen sexy” ;)
Den Song kenn ich nicht, aber das Problem hab’ ich ständig. Zum Glück hab’ ich einen guten Anwalt XD
In English,we can say.” I like this hammer but the other one has more heft”
It feels better in the hand, and will strike a good blow. which probably comes from the design of the handle!
Oh really? That’s actually a really great connection to heftig then :).
There’s actually also the word “hefty,” which basically just means “heavy.” (Can be a polite way to describe a fat guy, though that might be a little out-of-date.) One of the most popular brands of garbage bags in the U.S. is also Hefty.
Related to Tony’s comment, you can also “heft” a hammer or other thing that you might swing. I think that would just mean “lift” and/or get ready to swing it.
Quick addendum on “hefty”: in case it wasn’t clear, it doesn’t sound nearly as serious as “heftig.” Although one idiomatic use that comes to mind is “a hefty penalty,” which would be a serious punishment or large fine for breaking a rule or law.
“heft a hammer”… that’s great because it brings all the meanings together, you have it, you heave it, on the heft, ready for a hefty blow :). Also, I really don’t understand how I could forget about “hefty”. I do know it and it is soooo similar in sound. Bad brain, very disappointed :).
Do you have an idea for Muttiheft by any chance? Are you familiar with the word? Like… is you kid in school already and do they use it?