And it doesn’t just refer to honorable but futile DIY endeavors. Whether “Trust me, I’m an engineer” or “There, I fixed it”, these memes can all be summarized with this beautiful German verb.
Think of repairing bicycles and nuclear submarines with Scotch® or selltotape® (in German we call it Tesa®, by the way). This German verb describes the attempt to improve or repair something and only making it worse in the process. So, by implication, one could say that Fernweh describes a kind of homesickness for places you’ve never been to.Ĭomponents: schlimm (fatal) + verbessern (improve) This word is the counterpart to Heimweh, which means homesickness.
All there’s left is yearning, pining for unknown distances. Think of staring through windowpanes on rainy afternoons, dreaming of blue seas and deep jungles. It’s what happens when there’s Wanderlust (itchy feet) but perhaps no opportunity to actually wander. Here are seven of them:Ĭomponents: Ferne (distance) + Weh (pain, yearning)įernweh describes the yearning for foreign lands, the desire to travel. One of the great things about learning a new language is that you gain access to a whole new range of words that don’t exist in your mother-tongue, boiling certain concepts down to an essence. German is infamous for having a lot of words which are untranslatable, or at least difficult to translate, such as Schadenfreude, Zeitgeist, Wanderlust and other popular compound nouns which were happily adopted by English and other languages. In short, if “there’s an app for that”, there’s probably a German word as well.
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