The Brits Say Boxing Week, but in Germany We Call This Time “ Between the Years”.
By: René Junge
Tags: Idioms, Language, Germany, Culture, World

The Brits Say Boxing Week, but in Germany We Call This Time “ Between the Years”.

Idioms are not always logical. That is why it is so difficult to translate them between different languages. But it is worth knowing one or another idiom of another language because they say a lot about the mentality behind them. René Junge Follow Dec 17, 2020 · 3 min read

Photo by David Klein on Unsplash

Even for many Germans, it is difficult to explain why we call the time between the twenty-fourth of December and New Year’s Eve the “time between the years” or simply “ between the years.”

After all, between means that something is after the end of one thing and before the end of another. But there is nothing between the end of one year and the beginning of the next. There are no days between the years. The last days of a year still clearly belong to the year that is now soon to end.

But that doesn’t bother the Germans. Especially the older ones insist on calling these days “between the years.”

So why do we use this illogical expression? Germans are known in the world as super-rational and reasonable, aren’t they?

Well, it may surprise many, but that is only one side of the coin. We are not and never have been a nation of pure rationalists. We love to play with our language and elicit meanings from our words that are not inherent in them at first glance.

When we say “between the years,” we do not primarily mean a clearly defined calendrical period of time. We mean a mental state in which we find ourselves during this time. The few days until next year are no longer enough to start something new, and it feels too early to start looking ahead to the coming year.

This week at the end of the year is a time to pause. But we don’t pause because we want to take time off, but because we don’t know what else to do with these days. We find it difficult to attribute them to the old year because we have already mentally checked it off.

But we also don’t see these days as an opportunity for a new beginning. So these days seem to be smeared somewhere between the years, like an electron between its infinitely many possible places of residence. The year is over, and it is not over.

Perhaps we should change our minds and rename these days Schrödinger days, but as said: We are not pure rationalists. We need the prosaic, the weight of meaning in our idioms, even if we would never admit that to ourselves.

If you were to ask a German on the street what “ between the years” means to that person, I’m sure you wouldn’t get the explanation I just gave. Germans don’t think about the meaning of their idioms every day any more than Americans or Brits do. But most would probably agree with that explanation. They would tell you that these days just don’t feel like they belong to the old year anymore, and they don’t feel like they belong to the new year either.

I hope I could give you a little insight into the German mentality. I would also be interested to know if you can relate to this term for the last week of the year. Does this expression seem appropriate to you or just very strange?

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

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