I’m really surprised it got so many likes in such a short time. And only a quarter of them is from people who I know to be German native speakers (or at least fluent in German).
I’m not a native speaker, I can’t answer your question was what I was trying to tell you on the factual level, so you understood what I was hoping you to understand (kudos to you for that, because I was deliberately risking you didn’t). But that’s not the meaning of the German idiom, as @Vsotvep pointed out:
And yet @Vsotvep doesn’t seem to get my message on the joking level, the explanation purely focuses on the meaning of the idiom. But it was a reference to a phase when people* jokingly translated German idioms into English, by translating each word and keeping the structure of the German sentence (in my experience the egg idiom translation is the only one that still comes up from time to time, maybe because it’s self referential and therefore easier to remember: the translation is bad, just as the idiom is saying).
*) by people I mean people around me, I don’t know if this was a thing in the whole German speaking region, so I’m not even sure @trohde understood my message entirely. And only now I realized that by doing those translations we were
So closes it the circle. It was probably my best joke this year so far. Laugh or be square.
The first verse ends on schlaf in himmlischer Ruh, the final one on der Retter ist da. And it’s einsam wacht, not waft.
I think both the literal and joking intent came across fine, it was funny ^^
But maybe it got so many likes because it’s still obviously an ironically awkward translation of the phrase in a silly, self-referential way, even to a non-germanophone
I don’t care about power, I’d prefer to stay anonymous than to become president, minister or CEO of a big company. And I don’t need tens or hundreds of millions. If given the choice, I’d just take a couple of millions, this is enough to live a comfortable life without appearing on tabloids.
And this is why even without knowing anything else about your politics, you’d make a better politician than most who have a realistic chance of getting elected
That is the more reasonable thing, I’d say, but we do not get to hear a lot about the people that do this. Think of how many thousands of people were rich and famous actors and athletes 20 years ago, but have gone out of the spotlight by now. It is safe to assume that they are “somewhere else” doing whatever they like with their previously earned money (e.g. Lucas Podolski made an icecream and kebab chain store back at his homeland).
So those, the vast majority of them, are out of the news cycles, unless presented in a “look what that person is doing now” kind of retrospection. On the other hand we have fame-vampires like David Beckham. Hasn’t touched a football in the past decade, yet he is still in the limelight. Magic Johnson’s still around in the news, while Tim Duncan and most of the retired NBA players are not.
It might be a case where the few people that can’t let go, seem to be giving a bad reputation to all the rest of them.
I wouldn’t call myself fluent in German, but having had some 320 hours of German lessons in school, I can sustain simpler conversations (I think somewhere between B1 and B2 level).
I understood that “not the yellow from the egg” is a literal translation of a German expression meaning “not very good”, so you proved (tongue-in-cheek) that your English isn’t great while saying your English isn’t great.
I have also seen some videos from youtuber liamcarps referencing the German expression translated literally into English, but I think I would still have understood if I hadn’t. It’s also pretty common for Dutch people to (unwittingly or purposefully) translate Dutch expressions literally into English.
[1] A pretty hilarious example from that wikipedia page: Former Dutch ambassador and prime minister Dries van Agt supposedly once said “I can stand my little man” (translation of ik kan mijn mannetje staan, a Dutch idiom meaning roughly “I can stand up for myself”).
I strongly suspected it went back to the 1950s, beatnik, cool jazz scene, because that is the usual context for it, which is why I said 70 years ago. I doubt it goes back to the 40s, but even if it does, it was popularized in the 50s, I believe. The connection to jazz does not sway me, as I dislike clichés except when used in a special or clever way. Here the cliché seems so archaic and arbitrary that I find it unpleasant.
Those who were born in 1936 or before have lived two square years.
The only perfect powers between 1850 and 2150 are 442=1936, 452=2025, 211=2048 and 462=2116. Only 2048 is a realistic goal for me.
Well, I’d think that “Das ist nicht das Gelbe vom Ei!” should be understood everywhere in Germany <edit> or in the German-speaking parts of D-A-CH. </edit>
The first verse ends on schlaf in himmlischer Ruh, the final one on der Retter ist da. And it’s einsam wacht, not waft.
