Knowing relations between words can help understand their meanings and build a more connected vocabulary network. Here, you can explore parents and offspring and discover the whole family.
- shows how many children or parents the word has
- get the translations and a link
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Sources for Etymology:
- Check "anstellen-2" on DWDS.de
Biggest German Dictionary, great for etymology, usage frequency and collocations) - "anstellen-2" on Wiktionary (English version)
(For etymological connections across European languages. Not always accurate) - Etymonline.com - Origins of English words
My favorite source for the origin of English words.
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I have found in Harry Potter 1, last chapter:
“Sie haben ja gesehen, was ich mit dem (den Troll) in der Kammer dort hinten angestellt hatte.“
In this example, which meaning corresponds to?
It’s the second one (“to mess up, to do mischief”).
The person is saying that “you should see what I did to the troll in the cabinet back there”, implying that they messed with the troll or manhandled them or something like that.
It doesn’t always be super harsh, but there is an undertone of “messing”. Does that help?
Yes thanks!
thought i’d mention both “sissy” and imo to some extent “pussy” (in this particular context) have a unpleasant vibe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sissy
What do you mean exactly with “unpleasant vibe”?
a kind of bullying misogynist frat boy vibe tbh. Sissy can be homophobic, or at least have that tone.
I’m not quiet sure of the exact range of sich anstellen in this sense. Is it limited to someone saying they don’t want to do something they are scared of? Or could it be just complaining about something trivial?
Think of a child whining at the supermarket because they don’t get icecream and the parent goes like
– Stell dich nicht so an, du brauchst nicht jeden Tag Eis.
ah ok. its got a stop whining kind of vibe. Not sure “acting sissy” would even work in that specific example. Perhaps in the instance where someone was complaining about having to do something and complaining about it wasn’t perceived as “tough and macho” it would make sense contextually…
Well, another example would be a bunch of friends wanting to skinny dip in the evening and one goes like “Hmm, isn’t it a bit cold? What if we get the sniffles?”
So it’s not always about whining.
I do think based on what you’ve said, though, that “sissy” is probably too strong.
ok, cool, got it…