Additional insubtitutables

[muckefuck]

Three more words that should've ended up on yesterday's list. (I may well end up retroactively inserting them.)

9. Fachidiot Another word I learned from Nuphy, since it's indispensable in academia, yet I can't think of a good English equivalent. Fach designates a compartment or section and, by extension, a field of knowledge. A Fachidiot may be a genius within his area of expertise, but his knowledge doesn't extend very far past the sides of the box. The closest approximation in English is probably "nerd" or "geek", qualified by subject (e.g. "baseball nerd", "physics geek").
10. Wichsvorlage From meaning "rub, polish [e.g. shoes]", wichsen has been carried over to designate a very particular kind of, er, polishing. (Nuphy likes to mention the troubles of the brand name Vicks in Germany, which can either be pronounced like Wichs, which is bad enough, or like Ficks, which is even worse.) The term covers anything you might have lying (liegen) in front (vor) of you for the five minutes or so you need. I first heard it used to describe a particularly raunchy poster adorning a dorm room wall. (Not long afterwards, it has been discreetly stowed out of sight.)
11. durchkomponiert Technically, there is a literal English equivalent for describing operas in the style of Wagner's Ring or Verdi's Falstaff, i.e. clear division into recitatives and arias, but "throughcomposed" sounds so incredibly awkward to me (on a par to saying "worldonlooking" for Weltanschauung) that I never use it.
12. Putzwahn "Cleaning mania" isn't a bad translation, but it sounds too clinical (as well as being more than twice as many syllables--so much for the myth that English words are always more compact!). A colloquial word like "craze" is often closer in meaning to what Wahn designates outside technical contexts (such as when Die Aerzte condemn the "Männlichkeitswahn" in their notorious song "Mädchen/Weiblich"); in any case, I'm generally against the current Wahn for classifying every departure from conventional norms as a psychological disorder of one sort or another. Calling someone "obsessive-compulsive" because they pull out their kitchen stove and scrub behind it on a regular basis seems to me like an attempt to dignify a mere prejudice by dressing it up with psychobabble.

Edit: Added two new terms.

Comments

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

"idiot savant"?

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

That's just what I thought! It's a misuse of the term, but people use it all the time anyway in the sense of no.8.

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

Yes, but not quite... I've never actually met an idiot savant, but I've met plenty of Fachidioten in my day. Microsoft, for example, has quite a few of them - take sinnabor, for example, who is a brilliant programmer but has never heard of Sylvia Plath.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

perhaps amateur is a more accurate?

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

Nah... this really does mean something like "good in one specific field, most likely professionally, but totally clueless about anything else." Amateur (at least to me) just means someone who's not yet good at something, or if you're francophone, someone who does something just because they are passionate about it. Fachidiot is... well, it is what it is. I've always dreading being one, perhaps so much so that I've spent too much time trying to be a polymath instead of "just a software test engineer."