Sorry to be a smartass, but there kind of is a construct like that, at least in colloquial language. In Austria for example, there is the colloquial saying “den Weisel geben” meaning roughly “to give a rejection” or to turn someone away/fire someone. A construction like “den Stiefel geben” would likely be understood as “to kick someone’s ass”.
2 Likes
I like the phrase Windows aus den Fenster schmeissen but defenestration is more of a Prague thing.
4 Likes
Jemandem einen Korb geben (turn someone down)
Jemandem einen Laufpass geben (fire/dismiss someone)
Jemandem einen Tritt im [ Hintern | Allerwertesten | Arsch ] geben (give someone a kick in the butt, as motivation to get moving)
4 Likes
Good to know. I stand corrected.
On the other hand, “Deutschland gab Microsoft den Korb” makes sense to German speakers but English speakers are wondering what Microsoft needs a basket for.
1 Like
1 Like
I don’t want to be typical German nit-picky, and I’m not the grammar/syntax police. So this is just to help you use these phrases correctly whenever they apply 
Jemandem einen Laufpass geben
“Jemandem den Laufpass geben” - for some reason there seems to be only one, and it is issued over and over again…
Jemandem einen Tritt im Hintern …
“Jemanden einen Tritt in den Hintern …” - the kick is administered to the butt, not inside it. That would be funny, but hey, it’s Germany… so no.
6 Likes
Yeah, I have been living in Germany for 30 years now, and still screw up declining the articles.
6 Likes
If German was not my native language, I wouldn’t want to learn it. I admire everybody who takes on this endeavor.
4 Likes
I studied German back in the day, because physical sciences majors had to take either German or Russian and I didn’t want to have to learn a whole different alphabet. At my most fluent, I’d be talking to someone in German for like five minutes, and they’d figure out I was American because I’d misgender a noun. I never understood why anyone would need three genders of nouns, and never understood the logic behind them if the noun didn’t end in a suffix I knew.
Even hin and her, unter and runter and darunter, etc. were easy for me to understand, and if not I could fake them with practice. Noun genders, not so much.
2 Likes
1 Like
Just for the record, the end of the Munich municipal Linux deployment had basically nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with the city’s mayor, who used to be a member of CSU (the Conservative party) being replaced with a different guy who is a member of SPD (the Social Democrat party) and according to what one hears, a Microsoft “fanboy”. There were some technical issues, mostly to do with using obsolete versions of OpenOffice (rather than the more modern LibreOffice), but according to Munich’s municipal IT services department, they were on a par with what would have been expected in a similarly-sized deployment of Microsoft Office. During the Linux years, the city saved some 10 million Euros in licensing fees and forced hardware upgrades, while the move back to Windows is projected to cost 90 million Euros.
The other thing is that Microsoft apparently let itself be persuaded to move its German corporate headquarters from the outskirts of Munich (where it had been located for quite some time) to within the city limits. Those €90m must look quite alluring to them because corporate taxes are a lot higher in Munich itself than in the surrounding areas, but then Microsoft probably doesn’t pay a lot of corporate taxes in Germany, anyway.
4 Likes
You got some of that wrong. Christian Ude has always been SPD, and the current mayor Dieter Reiter is also SPD. It’s the coalition parter that changed. and the vice mayor Josef Schmid (CSU), was the one who lobbied for using Microsoft again.
(Editing for disclosure: I live in Munich, but I am a die-hard Mac user. It’s simply the better Unix)
4 Likes
Totally worth it just for the Äs, Ös and Üs alone.
Did you hear that, Boing Boing BBS software?? Now look what you did to when you created my user name!
2 Likes
Ä is boring because we have that sound in English.
The sound, but not the letter.
Ätschi-bätschi!
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
