Of Naughty Cellphones and Cringeworthy Verb Management

Technology has been advancing fast and hard. A hundred years ago, the traffic light was a pretty new invention, and yesterday, I listened to a podcast that predicted entirely automated cars by 2060. Well... I guess there's still 150 years between that, huh. Is that fast or not? Who knows. Passage of time has also been slightly inscrutable recently, hasn't it.

Maybe a more impressive example: I'm 30 years old today and I made it through my entire school career without a smartphone. I got a Nokia flip phone in tenth or eleventh grade, and that was that. I am currently typing this introduction on my Samsung. Things have been changing rapidly, is what I'm trying to say. We all know this. Everyone loves saying it. It's been hard for society to adapt, but how about language?

German people love making up new words for things. Sadly, with these recent technology jumps, we’ve been slacking off! A lot of our tech words are English words. However, luckily, since we are all very strange, we still managed to be funny about it. Is there greater joy than creating an anglicism and using it wrong?

Yes.

In one of these cases, Germans have actually managed to not just take the English word for something and use it, but take just an English word, a random one, and declare that the new German word for a piece of tech.

If you take one thing away from anything I write, let it be this: You can do whatever you want, with anything, forever.

This time around we will be looking at:

• the German word for cellphone, which is the English word for... you know ;)
• managen: German conjugation of an English verb that drives me up the wall
• an endearingly annoying slang term for laptop

All Germans want a Handy

You may have heard this one before. At least I have seen a post go around Tumblr a while back, where someone introduced the world to the German word for cellphone. If you haven’t seen that, I’m telling you here and now and straight-up: It’s Handy.

It’s the English word handy.

There is a German word! Technically, the German word, the German German word for cellphone is Mobiltelefon. That one’s probably self-explanatory. I also can’t remember the last time I heard anyone use it, especially unironically.

So we all say Handy. All of us. Me too. It has long become so ingrained in German speech that I never even think about the English meaning of that word.

Which is, of course, when something is convenient! When something comes in handy, for instance. That’s what handy means.

Definitely nothing else.

Certainly nothing nasty.

So why do we call it Handy? The etymology here is also fairly straight-forward and probably surprises nobody. We either took it straight from the English word hand (which, in German, believe it or not, means Hand, but I guess we didn’t care about that), or from the first clumsy attempts at naming this new device which originated in the 40s and was then called a handheld two-way radio, or Handie Talkie.

It does all make sense! Surely you can see where we were coming from. This sort of thing is called a pseudo-anglicism, where it looks like we’re using the English word for something, but are actually using a word that doesn’t mean the same in English. So that’s all well and good.

I just can’t help but wonder.

When German people started picking this up from English speakers... When English speakers watched German people go on and on calling this thing a Handy...

Why did nobody stop us.

Actually, I’ll tell you why.

Because it’s funny.

And I guess it could have been worse. At least nobody in the 40s came up with a blow-operated two-way radio.

I want to go on a dirty little detour here: I want to tell you guys about the German word After.

After means butthole. Well, it means anus, kind of. The German word for anus is Anus, but After is yet another more graceful way of saying butthole. If you’re trying to, for whatever reason, be professional and non-crass when mentioning buttholes, you can say After.

Now, perhaps you can imagine where I, a constantly confused bilingual person, start having a certain brand of problems with this word.

Imagine my surprise after finding that there is no English noun called after! The word after exists, of course. But it is not a noun. It does not mean what I thought it means. When English speakers use the word after, their word after, they do not find it half as funny as I do.

The etymology here is probably also obvious. In essence, both words still do mean the same thing. Both the English after and the German After are describing some sort of behind.

To loop back to Handy one last time, in case you’re here to actually learn something for your German vocabulary: The plural of Handy is Handys. As complicated as German loves to make everything (including plurals!), we don’t turn a -y at the end of a word into -ie if it’s plural. So it’s Handys. The same goes for Babys or Hobbys. Drives me up the fucking wall. But that’s my cross to bear.

Managen: a poorly gemanagt verb

I freelance as a transcriber, occasionally. Most of the time, I transcribe German audio, and most of the time, sooner or later, someone there is going to use an anglicism. Most of the time, I’ll know how to transcribe it. A little while ago, one came up that completely blindsided me.

You know how third person singular makes verbs end in -s? German schoolkids have a slogan for that, actually, or at least they did during my time in school: He/she/it, das S muss mit. “You gotta take the s with you,” basically, but it rhymes. Cute, right?

Anyway, German does a similar thing. Third person singular usually means your verb will end in -t. Not always, of course, because grammar is a slot machine and you are trapped in this casino until the end of time.

For some reason, the English verb to manage has become an anglicism. This one’s funny to me, because the German translation would be handhaben – Hand of course means hand, haben means to have. To handle would then be a good translation of this German translation of an English word. The word manage itself stems from the Latin word manus, which, again, means hand. So all these words mean the same thing. Which means we already had a German word for this. We didn’t need to manage, we had handhaben.

Now, again, I don’t mind anglicisms, I think they’re fun, and sometimes we just don’t have the vocabulary in our own language. Managen – which is the germanified verb, because our infinitive verbs end in -n – just... it just looks so bad.

As I said earlier, this came up because I was transcribing something. Someone there used managen in third person singular. -t, remember? So... Er/sie managt.

Managt.

That’s the official spelling.

When I was transcribing it, instinctively, I wrote managet, because, you know? That’s how the g in there is pronounced. There’s gotta be an e there. But I wanted to make sure, so I looked it up. And it’s managt.

Don’t you just hate looking at it? Managt.

Managt.

I’m going to make myself dizzy with hate if I keep going like this.

It looks wrong! I hate it. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. It should not look like this. Managt should not be a word oh god I wrote it again.

The one good thing about this, the one sliver of, maybe not hope, but just something other than hate, is that it reminds me of the word Nagetier.

Nagen as a verb means to nibble, to gnaw. Nagt, then, is once again the third person singular conjugation. Hence my thought process from managt to Nagetier.

The German word Tier means animal. (I have looked into why Tier and tier are nowhere near the same word, actually, but that’ll have to wait until another post.) What do you think Nagetier means? What’s a gnaw animal? Did you guess it?

It means rodent. :)

It’s the little things that make me happy and not resort to violence because I had to look at the word “managt.” The next time I see a manager (I say, as if I had ever seen one or, indeed, plan to ever see one), I will behave peacefully on the outside and rejoice in calling them a Managetier on the inside.

Coinkydink for Germans: der Schlepptop

Here is one last bastardization of an anglicism that I personally find much funnier. It does also drive a German friend of mine up the wall, so, use with caution. Or with wild abandon, depending on the sort of life you want to lead.

The German word for laptop is Laptop. As you’re probably starting to see, we didn’t really bother making up fancy German words for a lot of technology. Computer in German also means Computer. Some people will call the tower of a desktop computer a Rechner, which comes from rechnen = to calculate, which kind of makes it a calculator, huh? Lap means Schoß, and so a Laptop could be a Schoßrechner. Is anyone with me? Should we make Schoßrechner a word in 2022? This thing on?

Ah well.

So we say Laptop, and for once, we also usually pronounce it pretty correctly. Not a lot to do wrong there. Now, schleppen means to drag, to haul. Pulling or carrying something heavy, that’s schleppen. I think schlep also exists in Yiddish and made its way into English slang like that, although my Yiddish isn’t as good as I want it to be yet, so I can’t guarantee that the meaning is exactly the same.

As I’m typing this, I wonder how outlandish the idea of hauling a laptop around is now compared to when laptops first started being a thing, and when Germans started saying Schlepptop. A lot of them are all small and light now. And the goal of a laptop has always been to be portable and all, but they still used to be thicker and heavier than they are today.

Anyway! Schlepp rhymes with lap, so Schlepptop started being a thing. To be clear, this isn’t actually a very commonly used word for laptop. Most people just say Laptop, as do I. Schlepptop is a word for the kind of person who would also say coinkydink. You know? You know.

Schlepptop is, at the end of the day, a portmanteau, so a word that is a cross between two other words. However, in German etymology at least, this sort of cross is also referred to as a contamination.

Isn’t that fun?

There has been a terrible containment breach. All your neat tech words have been contaminated by the fundamental weirdness, awkwardness, and, last but not least, horniness of the German language.