Today's Gender of the Day Is Potato Salad

You know these things aren’t only about language. I’m not just teaching you funny words, that’s not what you’re here for, and that’s not what I’m here for either. Am I teaching you German culture? I don’t know about that, and I don’t want to think about it, actually, because defining the meaning of the word culture has been the bane of my existence for several years ever since I started university. So maybe it’s not about culture. (Because I don’t want it to be about culture.)

So let’s use a much simpler word. Today we will fill some clichés. Nothing wrong with that! Some of them are fun, and I definitely meet a fair share of my own, but rarely the German ones. I’m German in that I grasp every opportunity to talk about how much I miss vacationing in the Netherlands, and as soon as I walk into any room I immediately throw open every window. Then again, I don’t drink alcohol, ever, I’m proud to call myself an optimist, and I don’t care for salad. So there the Germanness kind of evens itself out a bit.

This one is about the German clichés of being obsessed with alcoholic beverages, pretending like pessimism is funny, and being pedantic about the significance of mayonnaise in a salad. I’m not invested in any of these debates, and yet here I am being a Klugscheißer about them, because I find such fun in being irritating. Maybe that’s really where the German jumps out.

Jumping out at you today will be:

• the time we saw a bunch of numbers and figured we must be drunk, or: the German term for angel numbers,
• a single verb for when you come in to save the day and then fuck up so, so bad,
• me Germansplaining to you what a salad is.

Angels Don’t Exist, but Schnaps Does

A while ago, I saw someone in my online sphere talk about angel numbers, and how nice it is to see them. How they are a sign from angels, some benevolent message that we may not understand, but at least it looks nice, right? Of course they look nice, they’re angel numbers! It’s such a sweet idea, and such a human instinct to assign something soft and meaningful to something as trivial as numbers.

If you’re not aware, an angel number is a number, or number sequence, that’s comprised of repetition, like 7777 or 44. It’s perfectly simple, but we as humans just want it to mean something.

Wanna know what they’re called in German?

Schnapszahl.

Wanna know what that means? Surprise! It’s not pretty!

You probably know what Schnaps means. It’s one of those words that just got carried over, it’s a highly alcoholic beverage. And Zahl means number.

So it’s not an angel number. It’s a schnaps number. A booze number. You’re seeing all these identical numbers because you’re drunk, and you’re seeing double. And triple. It is not a message from above! You just need to sit down and have some water.

You know, I don’t always feel inclined to agree with this notion that German as a language is funny for its practicality—famously, our word for plane translates to fly thing, and our word for gloves translates to hand shoes. But, more famously, we have also birthed some pretty good poets! We have all these words and we play with them, and often we can craft something beautiful!

But today, I can admit it. You got me. Alright? You got me, and you got my language.

The only way this could be any more German is if it was called a Bierzahl.

Ya Blew It in a Specific Way

This notion itself isn’t inherently German. Other languages have a neologism for this as well, and some have a saying instead of a single word. I’ve found the English saying “to kill the patient with the cure,” which is actually extremely cool, if you ask me.

But the German language is once again very German about this word.

You know when they gave that guy that one painting to restore and in his attempt to make it better he made it look like he tried doing it with his non-dominant hand just to give that a shot? Yeah, that’s verschlimmbessern.

Verschlimmbessern is a top tier portmanteau.

→ ver- is a prefix which usually signifies change—pretty drastic change, often enough.

→ schlimm means bad, but not in the sense of a poor performance. More in the sense of something terrible.

→ verschlimmern, then, means making something worse.

→ besser means better. German does the same thing English and several other languages do, which is being a dick about the adjective good. It’s not good–gooder–goodest, and it also isn’t gut–guter–am gutesten. Not even am gütesten. Can’t have shit in Germany. It’s gut–besser–am besten.

→ verbessern means making something better.

→ Makes sense!

Verschlimmbessern.

I used to get confused about this word, in all honesty, because it does end in -bessern, so sometimes I’d forget its meaning. Sometimes I’d think it means that you actually make something better. Maybe you made it worse first, or you were even trying to make something worse for someone, but ended up doing them a favor, accidentally. You know how it is, with enemies and whatnot.

Anyway, that’s not what it means.

What it means is that Germans mashed up a bunch of words to make a new, longer word, to mean something that’s pretty bad in a slightly funny way.

Like when my country “lifted” the ban on MLM for donating blood but instead established a ban on MLM who aren’t monogamous and suddenly went out of its way to create a new ban for sexually active trans people.

Now that’s what I call German!

Did That Make You Mad? Exact Your Revenge With Kartoffelsalat

Sorry about the politics. Oops! Anyway. Here’s one more classic for the road.

Kartoffelsalat is potato salad, and Germans love fighting about it. I’ve talked at length about how much we love bread, and we do, but perhaps in second place of foods we are passionate about are potatoes. We use them a lot, we make great stuff from it, as a lot of places in the world do!

Now, we are not a large country. Compared to other European countries, we’re I guess average, but compared to, say, some North American countries, we are miniscule. I could get in my car and drive for three to four hours, and then I’d be in a different country. Of course, regional differences are still to be expected, every place with more than one region will have regional differences.

Still, the sheer amount of Kartoffelsaladkrieg (potato salad war) in a single little country boggles the mind.

I’ll tell you right now: I don’t care about this. I have no horse in this race. I don’t particularly care for potato salad—it’s fine, I do enjoy potatoes, but I can’t remember the last time I had potato salad, nor any time I had a craving for it. Even if I did, I doubt this would matter to me. I simply do not care about what is or isn’t potato salad. Last passover, I made lasagna with matzot instead of pasta. That’s not lasagna, but I’ll still call it that, because,

1. whatever, and
2. it’s a great way to make people mad, and I love making people mad about food!

Now, the same goes for potato salad. The literal only time I’ve even brought up potato salad in several years was because I asked a fellow German whether or not fries with mayonnaise should count as potato salad, and then I leaned back and watched the carnage unfold.

(That fellow German and I are no longer friends.)

(That wasn’t because of the potato salad thing, but I’ll be honest, it didn’t help either.)

If you look up Kartoffelsalat on German Wikipedia, it’s already differentiating between “3.1 Ohne Mayonnaise” (without) and “3.2 Mit Mayonnaise” (with).

On Wikipedia.

It starts out pretty simple. Potato salad is made from potatoes. These potatoes are to be boiled and cut into slices before being mixed with the other ingredients. You can boil them with or without peel—curiously, that’s the one part that doesn’t seem to matter.

This already suggests that fries with mayonnaise are not, in fact, potato salad, since the potatoes are fried and cut into a finger shape instead of slices. However, sometimes potatoes are cooked before they’re fried, and the potato salad basics don’t specify whether or not you’re allowed to do anything else with the potatoes after you’ve cooked them. If I cook them first, then fry them, technically they’re still fit to be potato salad potatoes.

The shape is an issue, I guess. I don’t know that I’d still recognize sliced fried potatoes as fries. It seems to me like you could make an argument for artistic liberty, though, if at that point you haven’t been punched in the teeth yet.

Anyway, adding mayonnaise to potato salad at all is more of a Northern German thing, and down in the South they tend to have other plans for their salads. It really barely matters where you take your potatoes, though. “Regional differences” is already kind of a big way of saying this, because you could really just go into any German town, flag down two different people on the street and ask them for their opinion on what is or isn’t potato salad, and they’ll give you two different answers.

And then you, too, can make them fight!