Why can “fast” also mean immobile?

 

Milda fast asleep: she can perform this trick absolutely anywhere

Fast asleep? Fasting period? Fasten your seatbelt? How come we have so many expressions that use “fast”, but actually mean the opposite? Better ask the Scandinavians, Dutch and Germans…

English has a seemingly bizarre vocabulary that only makes sense if you know where words come from. We get away with all kinds of expressions that make absolutely no sense at all until you get an explanation from an etymologist (or someone who just googled it, because as everyone knows, they know everything).

FAST ASLEEP

So why? The only times you should be fast asleep are either in a bunk on a night train or when you take a nap in a car (make sure you’re not the one driving before you execute this action).

It comes from the Germanic root meaning “fixed”, which in fact is most likely an offshoot of the same origin, albeit through Latin. In Old Norse, fast originally meant the same: “quickly” or “swiftly”, and also “close to” or “almost”, but after some time, the meaning expanded to include “firmly” or “vigorously”. This is because when you go fast in a race, you are keeping up with the leaders, and therefore sticking to them.

But remember, they didn’t have a concept of speed like we do – speed was enabled either by horses, or by falling in a straight line from a cliff or tower. If you consider the idea of going quickly meant you were probably hunting or being hunted, the analogy starts to make sense.

The most probable origin is that of a hunter or horse rider keeping up with his/her target or competitor. Both travelling fast and “sticking” to the other. So the idea of being “fast asleep” is that you are figuratively glued to slumber and cannot be woken up.

Coupled with this, the word fast in German means “nearly”, again giving the impression that something is close to the end or even imminent.

This double-idea of “fast” is manifested in the expression “fast approaching”. The word fast in this sense can be interpreted as either time passing quickly or something that will inevitably and remorselessly reach its climax or conclusion, therefore fixed.

 

FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS

So when the pilot on an aircraft says “please fasten your seatbelts”, they are saying “affix yourself firmly to the seat”. And here we get the whole picture: at some point the ideas of “firmly” and “vigorously” got blended with “quickly”, probably through things like the Old Norse expression “drekka fast”, meaning “drink hard”, in other words knock back some ale as quickly as you can as if it was an obligation. You can find an explanation of the -en suffix further down this article.

 

GERMANIC EXPRESSIONS

Some expressions from other languages can corroborate this:

German:

Festmachen (fast + make) = to secure / to attach / to tighten / to fasten

Befestigen = to couple / to install / to attach / to moor

Eine Freundschaft festigen = to cement a friendship

Wasserfest = water-tight / water-resistant

Festlegen = to determine something / to define something / to establish (e.g. a fact)

Dutch:

Vast = firm, tight

Vastzitten (fast + sit) = to be stuck

Vasthouden (fast + hold) = hold on tight to something

Alvast = in advance / already (therefore inevitable)

 

Danish:

Fastsætte = to fix / set a value to something

Fastansat = permanently employed

 

FASTING PERIOD

When we forgo food and drink, it is known as fasting (verb: fast). But why? Well, this is also linked to the above: in the deep, dark days of the Germanic languages, fast had the concept of holding firmly to something, or faithfully observing a particular ritual. So then this also has some logic to it When we fast, we have firm control of ourselves, and we are holding on to our beliefs through the observance of this ritual.

Fasting therefore has the same concept as being fast asleep: both are “sticking” to their meanings.

BREAKFAST

This brings us nicely on to the word breakfast. This of course signifies exactly breaking your fast, so eating after your night’s sleep. But it wasn’t always that way – up until quite late, in fact, it was called morgenmete, or “morning meat” (in Danish it is still morgenmad). This is because a morning (pre-noon) meal was a rarity in some parts of Europe, so a morning meal was consumed as an exception, possibly to give strength before a journey or a battle.

Take, for example, the French “déjeuner” (dé = to go the other way from + jeuner = to fast) is actually lunch. This stems from the Latin verb disjejunare (jejunus = barren, dry, meagre), in other words to end the dry period. In France they ate for the first time around noon (of course, nothing to do with the French stereotype work ethic, I am sure…) but once the idea of eating earlier took hold, it was called “petit-déjeuner”, therefore “little breakfast”. If you have seen what the French eat in the morning (I use the word “eat” loosely), you can see where the “petit” fits in.

Although the Spanish desayuno has the same root, almuerzo is generally accepted to mean “lunch”, but this is not universal in the Spanish-speaking world. Almuerzo has the Arabic prefix al- that is very common to Spanish, plus morzar, from mordere, meaning “to bite”. And the German Frühstück, which means “early bit”, gets an honourable mention here. But then we see the Dutch ontbijt (ont- = prefix same as un- + bijt = bite), it maybe has the concept of unclenching one’s mouth, or again, breaking a fast. With Spanish and Dutch having similar meanings, I wonder if there is a connection through the former's colonisation of the Low Lands.

OTHER VARIANTS:

Handfasting

In the distant past, it was common for two people to promise each other in marriage through an official ceremony known as handfasting. This came from the Nordic idea of shaking hands to seal a deal, but was adapted in English society for a betrothal to your promised one. It lives on in modern-day Pagan circles to signify a coming-together of two loved ones through the ancient tradition of wrapping and tying a cloth around the couple’s conjoined hands and declaring their intentions.

Steadfast

The word stead, which lives on in words like instead, means “place”, is often found in word compounds and collocations, one of them being steadfast, which does exactly what it says: fixed in position. It means someone who is resolute and consistent in his/her beliefs or is unshakable in matters of principle.

 

-EN SUFFIX

Fasten is one of many verbs that contain the -en ending. This is probably the most Germanic thing English does: amongst other things, the -en ending in Dutch and German can signify verb infinitives, and any lingering verbs in English generally signify that someone has done something to another person or an object, e.g. darken, weaken, lengthen, cheapen, straighten, enlighten, hearten, tighten, frighten, sharpen, sweeten, etc.

 

ROUND-UP

So this is why “fast” means two opposing things, known as a contranym. Lots of words do this in English – other languages too, but not as much. This is because over the years English has homed in on some single acceptable spellings and pronunciations. It has broken down the much larger number of variants of similar words and arranged them into these blocks of words with the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings, which can only be identified by the rest of the sentence or the overall context of the text or dialogue. This started at the arrival of the printing press back in Tudor times and quickly transformed the way we speak and write the language. Despite only a little over a century and a half between them, the English of Shakespeare (b. 1564) is closer to our English today than it is to Chaucer’s (d. 1400). But that’s for another time.

Raymond Goslitski

In Praise Of The German Language

For years, German has been mistakenly perceived as “ugly” or “difficult”. It is not hard to point to words or phrases that bear out this opinion, such as “Knoblauchzehe” (clove of garlic), “Wasserrutsche”, (water slide), “Verdauungskanal” (alimentary canal), “Unabhängigkeitserklärung” (declaration of independence), “Haftpflichtversicherung” (liability insurance), or “Sechstausendachthundertneunundzwanzig” (the number 6,829). To the untrained eye, it looks like someone at the Goethe-Institut forgot to use the space bar when codifying the language, but actually there is a certain unmistakable clarity and purposefulness about it. Before you decide to make some disparaging comments and close this page, let me explain…

English and French are the main working languages in a vast number of international institutions and organisations, such as the European Union, NATO, the EBU, and the African Union. Many linguists point out that it is often to the advantage of those organisations to continue using English and French, because if formulated well, rules, laws, publicity, reports and correspondence can be ambiguous enough to be interpreted in multiple ways. But this is almost impossible in German, as what you read is what you get.

Several translator friends of mine working at the EU have told me that they and many of their colleagues, when translating documents into their own languages, often wait until the German version comes out before they confirm publication, just to check they understood everything correctly. I also know that the German translators in one of the EU institutions know this, and as such they are extremely thorough-going in their execution of their work; living up to the stereotype, one might say. They have such a huge following among other linguistic staff (this is the nearest any translator will ever get to having a fan club), they are frequently on the phone to the English or French department to ask for clarification from the original writers.

German is a language which lays bare the very essence of a thing, either abstract or real, in a way that the Latin-derived languages cannot. Something similar can be said of other Germanic languages, and all this has overlaps in English: at least the Germanic side of that schizophrenic Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Danish-French-Friesian tongue spoken by billions worldwide. To demonstrate this, I will take several words or phrases and break them down.

BARE DEFINITIONS

To define a thing, like a tree that bears apples, English opts for “apple tree”, a very easy and logical compound noun. German settles on “Apfelbaum” in the same way. In both cases, the two words in the construction are nouns; but here’s the clever bit: the words in the first part “apple/Apfel” are treated as adjectives, with the difference that German clumps them together, whereas English divides them into two words. Sometimes. But not always. German is incredibly consistent in closing the gap in their compound nouns, whereas English is rather wishy-washy, often opting for two words, but sometimes joining them together (e.g. toothbrush, sunrise, shopkeeper), or annoyingly adding a hyphen (e.g. fire-fighter, care-giver), just to provide some flamboyant variety and give writers of English vocabulary books an air of indecisiveness.

Because German puts all these words together, not only are they very easy to locate in a search engine, they are also remarkably explanatory in their meanings. So let us take a look at one or two of the words above:

The German word for liability insurance is Haftpflichtversicherung. It may seem like quite a nightmarish thing to find as the title to an official letter from an insurance company, often attached to a bill, but it has a certain descriptive nature about it. There’s Haft, then there’s Pflicht, and finally Versicherung. Haft is the challenging part to explain – it means detention or imprisonment, but can also mean binding responsibility; Pflicht means duty or obligation; together they mean liability. And Versicherung is the insurance. So, breaking it down like this we can determine that this insurance is what you pay to get you out of trouble when you have been a naughty boy or girl.

German does its best to lay everything out bare so that there is very little room for misinterpretation. English and French are full of homophones, homographs and homonyms that can only be determined by looking at the context of the rest of the sentence or paragraph the word is found in.

PREFIXES ARE A GERMAN SPECIALITY

Let us run with this idea a little further: the last word, Versicherung, contains the prefix Ver-. This is a most remarkable and versatile trinity of letters, and can signify quite a lot of things, often negative, such as:

1. how a situation may end up

verarmen = to sink into poverty / verderben = to decay or go to waste

“Arm” means “poor”, so the “ver-“ gives it an element of bad luck. Add “-en” and it becomes a verb. It manifestly means “to end up poor”. The same with “Derb”, meaning “dirt”, so it more or less means “turn to dirt”.

2. doing something you disapprove of

verarschen = make fun of / verschlafen = oversleep / verspielen = gamble something away

“Arsch” means “arse”, and the “ver-“ lets you know it wasn’t a nice thing to do, so it would maybe end up in English as “to arse about with someone”. Therefore, “schlafen” and “spielen” mean “to sleep” and “to play” respectively, and the “ver-“ prefix giving us the idea that you slept or played in a way that ended badly. The explanation is long, but the end result is succinct and very easy to grasp.

But it’s not only negative:

3. to bring to a conclusion

vermelden = to announce something / verbleiben = to remain in place / verknüpfen = to link up

“Melden” means “report” or “notify” and the “ver-” prefix allows us to know it is something that reaches its conclusion, the same with the others.

Another very revealing prefix is Ur-. It appears in a lot of words, like Urwald, Ursprung, Ursache, Urquell. Its origins tell a very instructive tale too. Ur- means, at its most fundamental level “original” or “primary”, as in the very first or the earliest.

1. “Urwald” is what we call rain forest, but German speakers label “primary forest”.

2. “Ursprung” means “origin” or “provenance”, so think about this: in the “-sprung” part of Ursprung, like the English -spring from the word “offspring”, it means exactly that; something like a combination of “transferral”, “separation” or “jump” with a preposition on the beginning, so Ursprung means “source” or “provenance”: literally “original leap”.

3. “Ursache” means “cause” or “reason”. “Sache” means “thing” or “issue”, so “Ursache” says exactly what it’s supposed to: by adding “ur” to “sache”, it literally means “original matter”.

4. “Urquell”, if anyone doesn’t already know, is the second word of one of Czechia’s most famous beers, Pilsner Urquell. The word Quell or Quelle means spring or water source, and adding “Ur” on the beginning turns it into a well. The Czech name for this beer, Prazdroj, means exactly the same thing: pra- is the Slavic equivalent of Ur- and zdroj means “spring” or “water source” too.

COINAGES

German is a language that does exactly what it says in the handbook. The difference between German and the Latin languages, though, is that because of this, nearly no new words can be coined in German unless you take two or three existing words and put them together. So any new coinages tend to be borrowed from other languages, mainly English, French or Latin. What I mean is German has a propensity for recycling already existing words to create new senses. For example, the German word for “glove” is “Handschuh”, literally “hand shoe”. Why invent a new word, when this creation fits like a… uhm… a glove?!

However, German is by no means a poor language: there are a great number of words in German that require explanations in other languages, and here are some of my favourites:

Sollbruchstelle: this is a word every language needs. It means the predetermined point that a machine or device will break or stop working properly. Cynics often believe their fridge or dishwasher is programmed to stop working one day in order to make you buy another one. That’s more or less what this means. Among other significations, “Soll” can be translated as “target”, “Bruch” means “break” or “crash”, and “Stelle” can mean “point”, so put all the words together, and there you have it: “target breaking point” in one word.

Sturmfrei: a great word, literally “storm-free”, used by kids and teens to say “I’m the only one at home; so if you want to come over, we can get up to all kinds of shenanigans”.

Fernweh: another one we should consider using, it means the opposite of “Heimweh”, what English calls “homesickness”. “Heim” means “home” and “Weh” means “pain”, so if we replace it with “Fern”, meaning “far” or “distant”, it means something we nearly all experienced in 2020: the sadness of not being in one of your favourite locations far away.

Verschlimmbessern: such a brilliant word, this takes the prefix “Ver-“ that we saw above, then adds two adjectives before we discover it’s a verb… “schlimm” means bad, and “besser” means “better”, and the “-n” tells us it’s an infinitive. It means that you make something a whole lot worse by foolishly attempting to improve it, like the botched restoration of the Ecce Homo fresco in Spain a few years ago, or when you inexplicably decide that what your carbonara sauce really needs is some cinnamon.

Schadenfreude: this word, like Kindergarten, Wanderlust, Doppelgänger and Weltschmerz, has made it to some other languages, although not everyone knows what it means. Schadenfreude is taken from “Schade”, meaning “shame” or “pity” and “Freude” meaning “joy”. So it means, in plain German, gaining pleasure from someone else’s misery or pain. We borrowed it from German, because no British person ever thought about doing such a thing in the history of the country. Ever. Really…

I lie. Anyhow, some other languages have an equivalent, like Dutch (leedvermaak), Croatian (zluradost), Hungarian (káröröm) and Czech (škodolibost)*, but others just use the German word, including French, Portuguese, and most surprisingly of all, Japanese シャーデンフロイデ – sha-den-fu-roi-de, if you can believe it.

LEARNING THROUGH CULTURE

Finally, it is my opinion that German should be considered as the Latin of the Germanic languages – not because of its age, or being the original Germanic language, neither of which is proven, but because Latin is the basis and foundation for all the other Romance languages, and provides a springboard to better understanding and learning the others. If you know German, it is really not a big leap to learn Danish, Dutch, Luxembourgish, Friesian, Swedish or Norwegian. Despite being a great distance away from Scandinavian languages, on the level of vocabulary there are strong similarities. The same goes for Latin with its descendants, or any of the mightily intertwined Slavic languages.

If you want to learn German or any other language for that matter, the best way to do it is to become familiar with the mindset and mentality of its users. And that is best achieved by learning not only about the history of the country where it is spoken, but also the types of words used by the speakers. And as a very last point, never ever translate word-for-word in your head to try to express or decipher something; because very often when we translate literally what is expressed in one language, it can end up being misconstrued in the target language!

* All of these words are also compounds of other words:

The Dutch “leed” means “suffering” and “vermaak” means “amusement”.

The Croatian word “zlo” means”evil” and “radost” is “happiness”.

The Hungarian “kár” means “damage” and öröm means pleasure.

And the Czech word škoda, yes, that of the car company, means “shame” or “pity” (imagine Czechs saying “I’m off for a drive in my shame”). Oh yes, and “libost” means “pleasure”. 

Be nice to the apostrophe - it may just save your reputation

Too many people in the English speaking world seem to put speed before punctuation. Good punctuation has often been a clue for prospective employers as to their candidates' appropriateness for employment. Not so much any more, although it is still a helpful decider when it gets to the final shortlist. Several friends of mine got interviews simply on their ability to punctuate correctly. These days, of course, it's way further down the list, but it is once again recouping its status as an integral part of the basic package of education. Not before time.

The apostrophe is a simple yet highly efficient symbol and helps the reader follow what you have written, because in text form there is no voice or face to hear your voice or see your face. Punctuation acts as a signpost to language and helps what I call "the voice in your head" know how to intonate written text. And emoticons are yet to make it into professional correspondence, it is only right that people use punctuation until a better system can be found. But I doubt there is one.

So let us begin by looking at the apostrophe's uses:

1. As a possessive (Saxon genitive):

We write "Phil's book" and "Jana's phone" because it helps us know it's a possession.

We write "My sister's houses" and "my sisters' houses" to show how many sisters. The apostrophe before the "s", only one sister; the apostrophe after, more than one.

In spoken English you would have to say it differently to make sure the listener was aware how many you were talking about, so you might actually say "my three sisters' houses", "both my sisters' houses", or the like.

2. As a shortening of certain verbal forms

a. "he/she/it is":
"It's a beautiful day."
"He's a handsome fellow."
"She's painting a wall."

b. "(s)he has":
"She's got a new car."
"He's been to the shop."

c. "they are":
"They're lovely apples."

d. "we have":
"We've waited for so long."

e. "I would"
"I'd like a kilo of tomatoes, please."

Et cetera...

And now where it is misused or ignored:

1. In possessive pronouns like "its":

As we have seen, "it's" means "it is", because we are removing part of the word.

"Its" is used as a possessive like "his" and "her". We wouldn't say "hi's legs", so why would we say "it's legs"? The apostrophe is to show there is something missing, and here it is clearly not being used because it follows the same pattern as "his" and "her" (see the etymology section at the end of the article).

2. In misspellings, like "they're", "there" and "their":
They are = "they're"
There = not here (just add a "t" to the beginning)
Their = belonging to them

Etymology:
English is a Germanic language, despite being over 50% populated with French and Latin words. This is because our oldest words are all Germanic. These are the words which have been in our language since before the Norman conquest in one form or another, and are usually the most important words, like prepositions (of, from, by, etc.), numbers, conjunctions (and, because, etc.), irregular verbs (sing/sang/sung, be/was/were/been, etc.) and names of basic things (seat, house, hat).

Therefore our personal pronouns are most probably going to be from Germanic too.

Let us take "his", "its" and "her" as a basis.

In all Germanic languages at one time or another there were cases (Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, etc.) and some still have them, like German. The "-s" in "his" and "its" is from the Germanic preference for that particular letter at the end of masculine and neuter words to signify there is a possessive involved.
The same applies to the "-er" in feminine possession. There is no mystery to it; no confusion needed - it is just due to the past and the English language's ties to other Germanic constructions!