Durcheinander, Chaos, Unordnung...

[sister_luck]

There may be another language-related reason why Germans can be less tolerant of mess than others: they don't really have a word for it. The closest is the word unordnung, which means "unorder," but that leaves Germans able to think of mess only in terms of what it is not, rather than having a concept for mess as a condition in its own right. It's like understanding coolness only as "unwarmth." It may be harder to appreciate something when the only way to conceive of it is as the absence of something else, especially when that something else is generally cherished. Many English words and phrases that refer to mess-related concepts and processes are utterly untranslatable into German in any meaningful way, adds Rindisbacher. Yard sale is an example. Relatively few Germans have yards or garages, he notes, and if they did, they wouldn't have hundreds of excess possessions with which to fill them, let alone expect others to buy them.

Via languagelog.


OMG. The cluelessness. I would gladly invite these people to our basement to witness the chaos therein. Just today we had to throw out lots of completely useless knick-knacks and genuine mementoes of past and current lives because the damp down there had gotten inside the boxes. And yes, we've even invented our own not-quite-Anglicism for hoarders: We call them Messies. I come from a family of pack-rats and there are flea-markets everywhere where you can buy Trödel which is exactly the sort of useless stuff that people amass in their basements and attics. Not everyone has a yard or a garage, but blocks of apartments come with compartments for every tenant in the attic or cellar or both and believe me, that's where excess possessions are kept. There was a Hoftrödel last weekend at one of the houses around the corner and if I had to translate that term, I'd choose yard or garage sale...

Yes, stereotypically, Germans have this tendency to clean lots and we recycle our rubbish and we value Ordnung, but saying it's because we don't have a proper word for mess? We do. Many. It depends on the kind of mess it is.