Obnoxious shop
I'm from Amsterdam. I was amused to see a jewellery shop in Berlin called Schmuck. It was only after I searched online that I found out it means 'jewellery' in German!
Sent by: Niladri
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About gift shops: I will never forget the words for present in either language because the word in one language always seems so malignant in the other! While Gift means poison in German, I always thought that Geschenk sounded a lot like the word "shank" in english which is, of course, a prison weapon!
One of the best shop signs I've seen was in Copenhagen, Boghandel , meaning bookshop.
In the US, where a lot of Yiddish has entered the common vernacular, we run into these things all the time. You can imagine the horror some experience at learning Germans can hire a Putzfrau, cleaning woman. In Yiddish putz is an expression for a man's private part.
What about the English 'Gift shop' which Germans find hilarious - Gift being the German word for 'poison'.
I´m from Berlin. You can also use schmuck as an adverb or adjective meaning 'great', eg. Du siehst schmuck aus, you look great, or Du hast ein schmuckes Auto, you have a great car.
One venerable Rolls-Royce model had to have a name change when it was sold in Germany. It was the Silver Mist.
But then a GM model sold here as the Vauxhall Nova, had a totally different name in Spain where it would have been read as 'No-go'.
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