h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think it's quite a common name in those parts, but given the similar talents, it's worth looking into. Lisa Stansfield's in Germany at the mo, promoting her new album.

You can ask her, then!

"Running on empty" (used in today's New York Times) is definitely not British English. I wonder whether like many American usages, it comes from the German? In this case, for a motor "out of gear" or freewheeling.

I think it means the motor is running but the fuel gauge is on empty - i.e. it will soon come to an inglorious halt.

Definitely American. It's also the title of an album by Jackson Browne, and I've always taken it as coming from the middle-American pickup-driving lifestyle with connotations of 'better to burn out than fade away'. (That last bit's from Neil Young)

"Running on empty" sounds Brit-English enough to me. I don't even think of it as a turn of phrase, or an idiomatic expression.

running on empty

At the end of one's resources, out of money, as in I don't know how much longer we can live this waywe're running on empty with no jobs in sight. This idiom refers to a car running when the gas gauge indicates it is out of fuel. [Second half of 1900s]



Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
Copyright © 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

All in all I would say American as well, by the way, it seems to be a lifestyle as well-running on empty ,permanently...sad but true

The German for "in neutral" (out of gear) is leerlaufen, leer by itself being the word for empty. I first came across it in Wittgenstein, where he talks of a wheel that isn't engaged (doesn't take any strain) in the activity of a machine, saying that it is not part of the mechanism.

This seemed to be the sense I first heard "running on empty" for; "drifting", rather than the "bankrupt" sense given above. "Running on empty" seems to be a literal (mis)translation of leerlaufen. Having entered the language, its meaning shifts as people use it for what they expect it to mean, rather than the meaning it came with.

I would like to compile a list of Germanisms in US English. Jetzt for instance gave rise to "yet" and "already" as used at the end of a sentence.

"The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work" ~Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, par. 132.

The first place I saw "running on empty" used, it appeared from the context to mean idling. Can't remember now where that was.

The only place I've heard the term used was to describe a person opperating beyond their perceived point of maximum endurance. In a physical capacity it would manifest as someone performing a high level of activity that had not - for example - eaten in some time. Mostly though i've heard it used in a mental/emotional context where a person is "all tapped out" and still going.


Kosh

Well, if I may be pedantic, and I don't think Recumbentman will mind,
I would further comment that:

1. I, too, only understood "running on empty" to mean, using the driving metaphor, driving with the accelerator foot down, but the tank empty. Also usable for someone who is carrying out physical or mental work and hasn't had any chance to regenerate (sleep, eat, drink) for a few hours.

2. "Leerlaufen" means just that: to run empty. As would a rain butt, a beer barrel or a wine cask if you left the tap open. A person doing this to a receptacle of liquid could be said to "leerlaufen lassen". Let it run empty. You can't say this about a car.

3. Leaving a car to tick over (NO foot on throttle, NO petrol being used) would be "im Leerlauf". (Warning: non seq coming up) Like my brain often is. As my Dad used to say "Do put your brain in gear before you start talking".

Did you read Wittgenstein in German?` If so, what was the complete context?

I hope this cleared things up.

The idea of a list of Germanisms in US English is very good. It wouldn't be complete thought without a mention of Yiddish - as it was mainly Jewish emigrants who use the "already" and so on. ... Or Jewish immigrants, depending which way you look at it!

The main culprits, though, are those rocket scientists - they had to keep thinking up words for new things, so they just said it in German and anglicised it. (von Braun, Siemens, and Einstein and so on - not sure which ones were actually working in the states.) I know Einstein wasn't a rocket scientist, but his mother tongue was German.

Thank you TC, I appreciate your input.

I don't read German well enough to read W in his original, but both the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations were published in parallel German-and-English texts. When I found something hard to pin down (frequently) I would look across and see if anything was to be gleaned from the German.

Unfortuantely I have lent my PI to my brother and won't be able to chase up the context until I get it back in a few days.

Let me hasten to assure you that we will wait. This is indeed an intriguing question and some of us curious minds really want to know.

I find it fascinating to consider the whole issue of engineering concepts and how often they take different expression in other languages. This is often driven by cultural values modifying pereceptions of mechanical operations.

Even in English the Brits and the Yanks can't agree on the names for dozens of automobile parts. And the whole notion of a clutch being let 'in' versus let 'out' has long boggled my mind since most folks will see the clutch pedal as 'out' even though this means the clutch mechanism itself is 'in'. And when the clutch pedal is pushed 'in' the 'throw-OUT' bearing has put the clutch 'out' of the transmission sequence.

For the record, running on empty, to me always conjured up images of race-car drivers on the last lap or bomber pilots trying to get back to base. But I also get fleeting glimpses of references to get-away cars, bootleggers, runaway wives and teenagers and assorted other desperados either too poor or too desperately preoccupied with making good their escape to have time for proper re-fueling. They keep going until they are 'running on fumes'.

The notion that the phrase 'running on empty' is a literal translation of the German for idling an engine in 'neutral', in the sense that the running engine has been disengaged from its transmission, does strike some harmonic chord with memories of a year I wasted not learning German properly. I got so tied up in unravelling the logic of their syntax that I had no time for learning vocabularies.

So I look forward to seeing the parallel translations. Haven't read any Wittgenstein since that same year when I was also learning nothing about Philosophy. How curious it is that both these shortcomings of my youth should return to haunt me simultaneously and in such august and learned company. I can only say that having gotten away without it for almost 40 years I'm glad it was you guys that found me out.
peace
~jwf~

*Waggling foot up and down* Clutch in - clutch out - clutch in - clutch out

My head hurts.

<>

Yes, of course, I have been trying to remember...

In a promo for the BBC's "China Week" is is revealed that there are 300 million students learning English: "That's six times the population of Great Britain".

Keeping busy W ?

Yes.
In 1987 when I was teaching in Shanghai, I recorded the listening exams for university entrance - for the WHOLE COUNTRY. Millions of prospective students therefore thought they recognised my voice. As this was about the same time that the BBC started a series called "Follow Me", I was often mistaken for the presenter of that. My children were first amused and then annoyed by the hundreds of impromptu English lessons this combination engendered.

I suppose Jackson Browne *could* have read Wittgenstein. My brother-in-law met him while hitch-hiking to the Isle of White festival. Jackson, that is, not Ludwig.

It would be interesting to distinguish between those words which entered English from German/Yiddish via the US and those which have more direct Germanic ancestors. I'm often struck by the similarities between German and English idioms and the unexpected ways in which the two languages work the same. This is probably why I find it so much easier to speak German than French. Only I can't think of any examples at present, so I'd better shut up.

Also...re Chinese learning English...I'm still reading Jung Chang's superb 'The Wild Swans'. She was allocated to a university English course during the Cultural Revolution - but after Nixon's visit and the subsequent thaw. She encountered great difficulties in finding suitable study materials. She relates how the first thing the textbooks taught was how to say 'Long Live Chairman Mao!' - only it didn't teach the gammar behind this. A previous English lecturer had been beaten to death after explaining that this is an example of the optative tense. 'Optative' translates into Chinese as 'Wishing for the impossible' - and how dare he say that it is impossible that Chairman Mao should live long!

Here's something else interesting: English is now compulsory for all Dutch school children. The first generation is now emerging for which English is, effectively, a universal second language. Last time I visited the Netherlands, I took a taxi from Schiphol. My racist taxi driver was compaining that some of the Turkish and Moroccan drivers didn't even speak English!