{"id":11221,"date":"2015-05-14T12:59:26","date_gmt":"2015-05-14T11:59:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=11221"},"modified":"2015-05-14T12:59:26","modified_gmt":"2015-05-14T11:59:26","slug":"quatschen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=11221","title":{"rendered":"Quatschen"},"content":{"rendered":"

I came across an interesting German word today – quatschen<\/strong> – which means to gab; to piffle; to talk rubbish; to chew the fat; to shoot the breeze; to blab; to yak; to squelch; to squidge [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n

It appears in a blog post<\/a> in the sentence:<\/p>\n

Aber da fragt auf dem Gathering auch niemand mehr, ob Esperanto ok ist, da wird einfach losgequatscht.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This means something like “But at the Gathering nobody asks any more if Esperanto is OK, they simply start yakking in it.” The Gathering in question was the Polyglot Gathering<\/a> in Berlin, which I went to last week, and the post is about the languages most commonly used there. It mentions that apart from English, many people there spoke German, French, Spanish, Italian and\/or Portuguese, and Esperanto, and that we switched between them frequently. This was certainly my experience – those were the most commonly-spoken languages there. I also met quite a few speakers and learners of Welsh, Dutch and Mandarin.<\/p>\n

The related word (der) Quatsch<\/em> means nonsense or rubbish, and the LEO dictionary<\/a> gives a long list of English synonyms for this word: <\/p>\n

folderol\/falderol\/falderal; balderdash; blah; blatherskite; flubdub; jabberwocky; malarkey; nonsense; nuts; punk; rubbish; taradiddle\/tarradiddle; tommyrot\/tommy-rot; guff; hoke; poppycock<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve come across some of these before, but not blatherskite, hoke, taradiddle, tommyrot or flubdub, and I haven’t heard punk used in this sense. According to the Oxford Dictionaries<\/a>, a blatherskite is “a person who talks at great length without making much sense.”, and is referred to as a Quatschkopf<\/em> in German, and a taradiddle is a petty lie.<\/p>\n

There are also some related quatschian expressions:<\/p>\n

– Quatsch! = My chin! Balls! That’s all my eye and Betty Martin.
\n– So ein Quatsch! = My eye! My foot!
\n– Das ist Quatsch! = That’s hokey!
\n– Mach keinen Quatsch! = Don’t be silly!
\n– Red keinen Quatsch! = Don’t talk nonsense!
\n– So ‘n Quatsch! = My ass!\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I came across an interesting German word today – quatschen – which means to gab; to piffle; to talk rubbish; to chew the fat; to shoot the breeze; to blab; to yak; to squelch; to squidge [source]. It appears in a blog post in the sentence: Aber da fragt auf dem Gathering auch niemand mehr, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,116,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-german","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}