“Slangle Bells”
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I meant I do know “Schmutz.” Sorry!
Quiite interesting! No, I’ve never seen either one of those expressions in that context. I do know You said you prefer “dreckig” to “schmutzig.” I find myself using “schmutzig” because that’s what I learned long ago. I learned “dreckig” only in recent years. Here’s my translation:
Gestern Abend hab(e) ich mir Nachos reingesnackt und (habe ?) Netflix geschaut (geguckt).
Perfect translation, and yes, you can skip the second “hab(e)”
Danke schön.
Just wondering if you could unpack the differences between Dreck and Schmutz a bit more? Can Schmutz have sexual connotations? in a way dreck can’t? Just thinking about the english word “filth” that would have been used by more conservative people to perjoritvily describe stuff with sexual content – but dirt wouldn’t. Weirdly dirty (its adjectival form) might get used in this context though.
Both “schmutzig” and “dreckig” can be used in a sexual context.
The only distinction I can make between Schmutz and Dreck is that Schmutz sounds a bit more like dusty fine grain stuff, while Dreck can be more coarse.
In a city full of garbage (I’m looking at you Palermo) I frequently said “dreckig” and “überall Dreck”.
But I now typed in Schmutz and Dreck into image search and I get the same results pretty much.
My father’s best friend from high school through the rest of his life was Jewish and my father used Yiddishisms quite often, one of them being ‘dreck’. I grew up hearing that word and equating it with ‘shit’, not literal shit but something of terrible quality.
I first heard schmutz from my oldest son when he was in first year German at school. I was sweeping the floor when he came home one afternoon. I greeted him with my broom in my hand and a pile of dog hair and crumbs at my feet and asked him to tell me a new German word he learned. He pointed at the pile and said “schmutz”.
Lastly, my German is veeeeerrrrrryyyy rusty (is there a German equivalent word for saying a skill is rusty?) but here goes: Den ganzen Nachmittag habe ich mich reingesnacked. Leider habe ich keinen Hunger auf Abendessen.
So here’s the correction:
– Den ganzen Nachmittag habe ich MIR [what????] reingesnackt.
The self reference is in Dative and you need whatever you ate as direct object.
“rusty” would be “eingerostet”… it’s pretty much the same core idea but in German, we base it on the verb “einrosten” which is like “to rust in” – in the sense of rusting fixed in a position.
“Warum hast du Eier in deinem Rucksack?”
“Die snacke ich mir immer nach dem Training rein”
Wow, the reply here sounds almost unintelligible, I listened to it like 30 times, and I can’t quite hear the “immer” or the “dem”. Basically everything in between “Oh, die” and “Training rein” seems compressed: Oh, die snacksichmimanahm Training rein. :P
Did you try lowering the playback speed? It’s fairly fast, the way I say, but the “real deal” would be even worse.
yeah, this is super interesting.
I can’t really hear “mir” or at least i’m not sure i’m hearing immer or mir but i can’T really hear two distinct words.
I don’t normally listen to these audio things that much but i saw the comment and maybe i should start cus this is good listening practice!
If this kinda slower than normal I wanna hear the real deal now. Is it fast or is it contracted?
I do realise the way i speak english is also insanely contracted sometimes, like a whole sentences that runs together and sounds like one word.
I can’t slow stuff down in my browser but maybe thats possible somehow??
I’m a very slow speaker in general, and the real deal in a gym would be just quicker. There’s definitely a “mi” there, but I can’t really argue as to whether there’s a pause between “mia” and “immer” or if it’s a continuous gradient. I’d need to see a spectrum plot for this :D.
If you’re logged in, on desktop, there’s a speed selector on the bottom right of the page.
It’s a basic browser based slow down but down to 0.75 it sounds okay. Should be there on mobile, too, but I haven’t checked the design of my footer bar in a while.
Thank you for your engaging and educative posts. This one caught my attention because in Yiddish I’ve only ever heard the word Bock used as an insult, in the phrase “alter bok” to mean an old lecher/sexual predator (literally an old goat).
Gestern Abend hab ich mir Nachos reingesnackt und Netflix angeschaut
Lieber nur “geschaut”.
Weird: I just remembered that “dreck” used to be relatively common in my youth (for “rubbish, poor quality”), but I wouldn’t have used it for several years(*). Pecking around a little shows that it’s still very much in circulation, and maybe even getting more popular in UK and US English. ((Edit: Aaaaand, of course, that word starts appearing before my very eyes: in today’s NYT there’s Frank Bruni yammering on about semicolons, in the course of which we get “…because you know your own skeptical reaction when people send you error-clouded dreck.”))
But “Schmutz” is nice to say (as is schmutzig), so maybe it’s time for another “schm…” word to be imported into English ;-) They’re actually few and far between: schmooze, schmaltz, schmoe, schmear and schmuck are all pretty familiar, but after that I’m running on empty.
(*) We would have said something like “don’t waste your money on that dreck”, or “Man, that piece that John wrote is complete dreck”.
This is, in a US context, actually yiddish, brought in the 30s to NY.
Saying something was absolute schmutz/dreck isn’t coming in from German, but from the influence of Jewish comedians, who left a massive imprint on American English language.
Could German be taking this word back in through English lang Movies?
Hmmm, it’s possible but I have NEVER heard schmutz in an English language movie (and I have seen a LOT).
I think it’s more likely that Germans came up with the use on their own. It’s not far fetched and “Dreck” was in use for this longer so “Schmutz” is really just a baby step away.
This is where I first saw schmutz used in English, hilarious sketch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t24XAntNCY
But yeah, people use it to refer to boogers in your nose and ear as well as stains.
OMG, it’s the sweat meme guy :D
Wow, I never would have thought that Dreck had such a “run” in English. Were y’all aware that it’s a German word?
Not I, sir… But German *was* one of the three big languages taught at my high school, so it’s possible that some of the students taking German amplified its usage amongst us other schmucks. (I actually chose to study German back then, at age 12, but the Japanese class was too small, so it was straight into the class of the unlovely “Nishida sensei” with me. Our resident Japanese teacher rapidly displayed his sadistic side, with “coconuts” (banging two students’ heads together, loud enough for the rest of us to hear), “flicks” (a technique to try and induce a headache), and slamming a student’s pile of textbooks on his (yeah, just *his*, the girls were “treated” to some of his other proclivities, for which –we later discovered– he’d been moved on from his previous appointment) head should they dare to talk. Bizarrely, in retrospect at least, he survived for about two years before being shifted sideways in the system, in some ungodly facsimile of the Catholic church’s actions with its child-abusing priests. After having received A+’s for every piece of work through those 2 years he gave me a C for my final grade, as I’d told him I wasn’t going to be taking Japanese the following year. My report card read something like: “I cannot understand Paul’s terrible decision to not study Japanese next year”, but in horribly broken English. What a guy! Anyway, my apologies, I seem to have digressed somewhat…)
Someone else mentioned that (at least in the US) it’s from the Yiddish, but that explanation doesn’t really get off the ground in the Australia of the 1970s/80s, when we were a lot less influenced by content from the USA than we are now.
Holy crap, that sounds like a teacher from 150 years ago. Banging heads together audibly? What the hell :D?
Gestern Abend habe ich mir Nachos reingesnackt und Netflix Filme reingezogen.
Perfect!
Gestern Abend habe ich mir Nachos reingesnackt und Netflix reingezogen.
Perfect!
Ich habe gestern Abend Nachos und Netflix reingezogen
Using reinziehen like this is perfect, but you forgot the self reference.
Gestern abend, ich mir snacke Nachos und ziehe mir Netflix rein.
It should be in past tense, and more importantly, “spanning” a prefix like this doesn’t really work. So you’d need to say rein after each part.
Gestern Abend haben ich und das Einhorn uns Nachos reingesnackt und Netflix angeschaut.
Perfection!!
Well… “Netflix geschaut/geguckt” would be better. But great use of “uns”.
great article, can’t remember if i heard these. These colloquial / slang articles are like golddust (cus this stuff gets pretty much ignored in class)
Could you say it this way?
“Gestern Abend habe ich mich Nachos reingesnackt und Netflix eingezogen.”
It would also be “reingezogen” after Netflix and the self reference/reflexive needs to be Dative. Other than that it’s great!
Gestern Abend, habe ich mich Nachos reingeschnackt, und habe Netflix geschaut.
It’s a Dative self reference, so it should be ____
Gestern abend habe ich mich Nachos reingesnackt und Netflix angeschaut. Was für ein Scmutz!
The self reference should be in Dative ;)
Those of us who grew up in New York City and frequently learned awesome Yiddish words from our Jewish friends are very familiar with Schmutz and Dreck. E.g., “How the heck did I get this schmutz on my shirt??” And “Don’t go to that restaurant, the food there is dreck.” :D
This really is a surprise to me. I knew schmuck and schmaltz but I wasn’t aware of Dreck and Schmutz :D
I’ve been married for 45 years and my husband and I do dishes together. He has always said, “There’s still some schmutz on this one.” (I wash, he dries.) His father grew up in New Jersey so I always assumed it was yiddish.
You two win the cute award this year. Doing the dishes together is just lovely :)!!
Interesting that English gobbled up snack from Dutch (probably a long time ago?) and hoovered Schmutz from Yiddish (maybe 100 yrs back?) It’s borrowing – not stealing!
Englisch hat sich “snack” reingesnackt.
Gestern Abend habe ich Nachos reingesnackt und Netflix geguckt.
Self reference is missing ;)