How Germans describe an affluent lifestyle, a colloquial term used for serving time behind bars — and a typical sarcastic response.
Image: Coloures-Pic - Fotolia.com
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Curtains and owls: German idioms that refer to foreign nations
How Germans describe a luxurious life style — and the idiom they use for serving time in prison.
Image: Coloures-Pic - Fotolia.com
Live the life of Riley
The German idiom "Leben wie Gott in Frankreich" literally means "to live like God in France" — to lead a life in the lap of luxury, or to lead the life of Riley (a phrase that is probably of US-Irish origin, but no one knows who Riley is). The German idiom likely refers to the great privileges the clergy enjoyed in France in the late 18th century.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/S. Kahnert
... And I'm the Queen of England
In English, a sarcastic response to an improbable, unrealistic statement would be, I'm the Queen of England. Other popular rejoinders include, I'm the Pope or I'm the Queen of Sheba, or I'm a monkey's uncle. The colloquial German idiom goes to an entirely different continent: "Ich bin der Kaiser von China" — I'm the Emperor of China.
Image: Ralph Goldmann/dpa/picture alliance
That is very odd
The German idiom "das kommt mir spanisch vor" literally translates as: "That seems Spanish to me." It goes back to the 16th century: Charles V, who was King of Spain from 1516 to 1556, was also crowned King in Germany in 1520, and Holy Roman Emperor a decade later. He brought from Spain customs and a language that felt odd to the Germans — it all seemed "Spanish" to them.
Image: picture alliance / dpa
Serving time
Steel from Sweden was once considered to be particularly high-quality and sturdy. It was used, for instance, to manufacture prison window bars. Jail time became known as "hinter schwedischen Gardinen," or behind Swedish curtains.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/P. Pleul
Pointless action
To "carry owls to Athens" (in German: "Eulen nach Athen tragen") is believed to be an expression that is over 2,400 years old. In ancient Greece, an owl was minted on the city's silver coins, as it is on the €1-coin today. Owls were seen everywhere in Athens, so as in the British idiom "carrying coals to Newcastle," it means doing something pointless.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
All Greek to me
What is Greek to English language speakers, takes on the form of villages in German. "Das sind für mich böhmische Dörfer" (to me, those are Bohemian villages) has nothing to do with architecture, but the fact that Germans could not understand or read the names of the villages in Bohemia, a region in the neighboring Czech Republic. The term refers to something alien and incomprehensible.
Image: Coloures-Pic - Fotolia.com
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People have always described things they do not know as foreign and decidedly odd.
In different European languages, "The symbol of what is utterly foreign was and very often is Chinese," writes Rolf-Bernhard Essig in his book on European idioms, "Phönix aus der Asche" (Phoenix out of the Ashes).
In the late Middle Ages, merchants in Europe spread tales of life in faraway China: "It was described as extraordinarily exotic, foreign, and mysterious — and its language even more so," the German author writes, adding that is why Chinese stands for what is inconceivable and mystifying in many languages. In German, for example, technical jargon is often referred to as "Fachchinesisch" (technical Chinese).
Today, the use of idioms referring to an entire culture as odd or uncivilized should be avoided. Still, it might be useful to know what Germans really mean when they declare themselves to be the emperor of China — check out the gallery above to find out.
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