My Favorite German Word: Verschlimmbesserung

I never intended to be a German Major, at Columbia. The grammar kept me laughing, so I just kept taking classes. The thing that amuses me most about German is how it single-handedly takes complex concepts worthy of a small paragraph and fuses them into a single word. It’s not a language. It’s an erector set. My favorite word? That would be Verschlimmbesserung.

Now, stay with me for a moment.

The prefex ‘ver’ often implies something becoming worse, and the adjective ‘schlimm’, already means you’ve got something bad on your hands. Thus, if you see ‘verschlimm’ written on the page, your boat was already sinking, and now it’s going down even quicker. The adjective ‘besser’ corresponds with its English cognate ‘better,’ and when you want to make an adjective into a noun, you can just slap an ‘ung’ on the end. Therefore, ‘besserung’ is the process of making something better.

But why only have a little complexity, when you can have a lot? The beauty of German is that you can take these compound terms and assemble them into one juggernaut of a meta-noun. Put the two together, and you’re taking something bad and mucking it up even more, in the process of trying to make it better.

Word Count in English: 17
Word Count in German: 1

Now, that’s efficiency in language!