Hello everyone, and welcome to our German word of the day. And this time, we’ll take a look at the meaning of dicht ▶ Some of you immediately thought of Goethe and Shakespeare and poetry, because poets are called Dichter in German. But dicht itself is actually about being dense. So the big question is: are German poets dense? This and much more is what we’ll explore, so let’s commence ;) Like many German adjectives, dicht has an English relative. Some of you probably now think of “thick” because it sounds similar. But the German brother of thick is dick which means thick as well as fat, in the sense of body weight. “Wir bei McDonalds sind nicht einfach ein Team, wir sind eine Familie. Wir gehen zusammen durch dick und dünn…. ” “Sollte das nicht dick und fett sein?” “Das ist der leise Teil, Herr Wojak. Den sagen wir nicht. ” “We at McDonalds are not simply a team, we’re a family. Together, we go through thick and thin…” “Shouldn’t that be thick and fat?” “That’s the quiet part, Mr Wojak. We don’t say that.” ▶ Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop…
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Way late with this comment, but I wanted to mention that I read a couple of Dashiell Hammett books this year, and in one of them (The Thin Man), “tight” is used to mean “drunk” (which the main characters are for basically the entire book). That’s slang from the 1920s or ’30s, so not exactly current, but there it is.
Ah, who knows, maybe it comes back. There always is a need for new slang words for these things :).
How’d you end up here on this post, by the way? Just curiosity?
Oh, I’d just remembered learning the “super drunk” meaning of dicht from the post, then when I found it in that book, I had in the back of my head that I’d like to check the comments and see if anybody else had mentioned “tight” with that meaning. I just finally happened to remember it while checking the site today. :)
Where is the PDF button??
Sometimes, I forget to put up the pdf. Then the button won’t show.
Hervorragend, wie immer! Vielen Dank für die Gelegenheit und die Hilfe, es freut mich und ich versuche mich weiterzuentwickeln und meinen Wortschatz zu vertiefen. Dank dieses Blog kann ich besser lernen ❤️
Super, das freut mich!
“Egal wie dicht du bist, Göthe war Dichter”. What does dicht here mean? Drunk? Thx
Yup, it’s colloquially used for “drunk”. Or “really drunk” we should say.
It was a fairly popular meme-format, by the way. This play on words with adjectives.
They’re hard to get for non native speakers though.
Here’s one of the dumbest ones:
– Egal was du hast,
Bruce Willes.
No matter how kind you are, German children will always be Kinder…
Ohhhhh, true! That’s the only one that works in English, right? Do you know any others?
Ich bin leicht überrascht dass du nicht die andere Übersetzung erwähnt hast. “Dicht” im Sinne von besoffen.
“Mann, du bist richtig dicht!”
“Ja aber Goethe war Dichter!”
Vielleicht ist es eigentlich nicht so oft benutzt aber ich fand es lustig
Hab ich vergessen :). Aber ja, das Meme ist lustig.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/j3WrQH71AnTJzeHGvhU_TAb87dEIhRJHi0N5Owld-K9-xDIC_X5CUyFiYBgMwOD3IUHnj7WdR3n_ReuXym7MYXz6hDpvqU50fAjMXPs-pwdjVQ
Hello
I am not a blog guy normally but your blog sucks me in. Thank you for the good content mate.
That was my goal all along :). I wanted to make it so people feel like they’re watching Youtube. Glad to hear you’re enjoying it.
Danke für den leiwanden Artikel!
“Deine Praktikanten” haben geschrieben:
eng = tight (Pants, races, budget etc. The core theme is a sense of being squeezed.)
Meerenge = the straight (In the context of a narrow portion of a sea or ocean)
A Meerenge is a “strait”, not a straight.
You can also find yourself in finanzieller Engpässe, oder Beschränktem Finanziellen Umständen, which would be straitened circumstances.
Die Meerenge zwischen die Insel Vancouver und das Festland in Britischer Kolumbien in Kanada ist “Georgia Strait” genannt. Es gibt auch eine Zeitung die “Georgia Straight” heißt. A play on words, since “telling something straight” means “telling the truth.”
Your lessons are so witty – really enjoy learning more German with this method.
I’m glad to hear that :)
Thank you so much
Many thanks for this wonderful resource, it’s been *incredibly* helpful in learning German verbs!! Are you by any chance interested in suggestions/requests/votes for the verbs to cover in future articles? I am learning German right now and have seen a couple of incredibly common roots that just seem to be in every other book/article that I read, but they are not yet covered here. :)
Absolutely! I’m all ears. I make no promises, of course, but I want to cover all important verbs at some point.
Das Gebiet ist dicht besiedelt.
The are is densely populated.
▶should be the area
In English hair is a singular noun. So, the translation of hair incorrectly follows the German norm.
This is one of those situations where I accept that “noch” should be there, but I’m not sure I really understand it. So I was digging around in the part of my brain marked “L.A. driver” to see if the idea of “still” ever shows up in my English insults. I came up with
The part in parentheses is something you could mutter under your breath. Do you think there’s a parallel between “still” and “noch” there?
I was wondering exactly what the expression implies anyway. Is dicht here what the driver should or shouldn’t be? Both could make sense to me.
Should be “dicht”. Like… you’re not “leaking” the crazy that’s part of the human condition. But yeah, if you think of English “dense” it could totally be the other way around.
That’s what the ganz had me leaning toward – but given dicht as “blind drunk,” I wondered. Or maybe dicht in the sense of “no signals from outside are getting in” (“Hasn’t it dawned on you that you’re in traffic, you moron??”).
Well, that would make sense, but then I think you’d ask
“Bist du ganz dicht, du Idiot?”
The “noch” implies that “dicht” is the “default/normal” state.
Hello,
This one is not “dicht” with typos, only a few ;)
“I was little undicht too” (I was a little undicht too)
“And with at in mind” (And with that in mind)
And that’s it!!
Two further comments:
Where’s the quiz?
Do tell Thomas there’s a thing called laser hair removal… unless he doesn’t want to get rid of his dichten Wald…
And a challenge:
Why does abdichten mean seal? If dichten means tight and ab usually means to separate, take away, then abdichten would mean to take away the tight and that would be unseal… ?!?!? I know, it’s German… I get it… :)
Bis bald!
Fascinating. Another article where I wrote huge chunks rather quickly (as opposed to getting stuck a laboring over a sentence for an hour) and almost no typos. There’s definitely a trend there :).
I completely forgot to insert the quiz, but it’s there now.
And as for “abdichten”… yup, your logic is totally right.
However, in English it’s the same.
– cut off
– seal off
They’re both about separation, only that the second is about separation by making the separating border really not separated :).
A REALLY “nice” one is “abdecken” which can be both: “to put a cover over” and “to take cover away”.
German can’t help itself.
That’s helpful to know. Re: typos, I did note that “Starbucks” is apparently translated into German as “McDonalds”, which was a bit surprising ;-) and your funny translation of
as
I’m pretty sure was meant to be The poem ring is porous, not poet. :-)
Separating the separation from existence? Separate-ception.
I was going to say separating the problem away from yourself by fixing it. At least that’s what popped in my head when I was thinking about “seal up”, which is kind of an odd phrase because what does “up” have to do with anything.
But I think it somehow brings in the idea of done, over, away (and maybe some kind of casual-ifying factor). Like, the pipe is leaking, no big deal, I’ll just seal it up with this handy leak fixing kit and then I won’t have to worry about it anymore.
“Seal it off” comes with a strong mental image of a dividing barrier between two things or areas, for me anyway.
I think the English “logic” with seal up is probably similar to what auf- does in verbs like aufessen (“eat up”) – it’s more about completion than directionality. At least that’s the vibe I get.
Totally agreed about seal sth. off – in English, it wouldn’t be the undicht place that’s sealed off, but what’s on the other side of it. You’d maybe seal off a damaged section of pipe until its cracks/punctures can be sealed (up).
“separate-ception”… indeed :).
This notion of separation by closing is prevelant in a number of words related to shutting.
– abschließen, absperren, abgrenzen
And for “abschließen” for instance, in context of a bike it means UNLOCK (in my head anyway), because you separate the bike from the pole it was locked to, while for a door, it means to lock by key.
Actually, this is a good topic for a new episode of everyone’s favorite show: German Prefix Verbs Explained.
The visual about unlocking the bike was super helpful :)
This is a comment test
Hallo lieber Emanuel
Ich habe just/ grade deinen Artikel gelesen . Es ist einen echten wundervollen Gedichte !
Ich wünsche nicht meckern zur etymologie des Nomen Dichter . Es scheint konter-intuitiv dass es hätte nichts mit das Wort Dicht gemeinsam . Weil ein Dichter kreiert, verfasst ein verdichten ( rhythmischen oder freie ) Texte in Verse . Es ist ein besondere Dichtung dass ein Poet wie Goethe kann .
Ich wünsche dir einen schönen Tag .
Bis Bald
Naja, um den Zusammenhang zwischen “dicht” und “Dichter” zu sehen, den du gesehen hast, muss man schon kreativ sein, und Gedichte kennen und mögen :). Ich habe eine Weile überlegt, welche Parallele es geben könnte.
Great article Emanuel.
Also, I want to thank everyone who made it possible for me to read articles on here for free. I’m really excited as earlier I was only able to read a couple articles a week. When I finally arrive in Deutschland, I will make sure of paying back to the community.
Vielen Dank!!!