Morton Salt has the slogan "When it rains, it pours" on it's web page and painted in large letters on the roof of their Chicago facility.
The US english slogan "When it rains, it pours" translates to German "Ein Unglück kommt selten allein" and back to common english "Misfortune seldom comes alone".
I understand it as a negative statement. How come a company selected it as a slogan for advertising? Are they telling me if you buy our salt you will break an arm or leg too? Can you help me to understand the meaning of the saying in advertising.
Way back when... The salt would absorb humidity out of the air. It would harden into a cake. Therefore the cook would have to break it up with a spoon or fork.
Also - if it was in a shaker you would have to cover the holes of the shaker and shake it vigorously to be able to break the cake up so you could sprinkle it on your meal...
Then came Morton with some sort of new chemical manifestation and they figured out how to prevent the salt from absorbing "too much" moisture, therefore it would pour easier... They packaged it in the cylindrical carton and put a pour spout on it and.....
When it rains (humid) - it (still) pours......
It really had nothing to do with the foreboding slang "When it rains it pours" or the other one "Bad things always happen in Threes"....
But "When it rains - it pours" was something most people already knew, so it was a fantastic slogan to coin, since most people knew it - but here in this case it meant something good!!!
There's your history lesson for today
By the way - The only superstition I know about salt - is if you spill it - you MUST throw a bit over your left shoulder to ward off bad luck.
Actually, this would be the proper saying in German: Wenn es regnet, gießt es.
Old Sayings seem to have gone out of vogue , come to think of it . Too bad , they at least made you stop and think or reflect on the situation . I remember an exercise in grade school ...maybe grade 6 or 7 where we had to choose a saying and then draw a diagram on paper where the onlooker would try to guess what the saying was by deciphering the drawing . Such as "look before you leap " or " a stitch in time saves nine ".
I'm sure you guys can come up with plenty of others ....
T
ngauger Wrote:....When it rains (humid) - it (still) pours....
Thank you! I knew it was not a matter of proper translation and you told me the story behind it
MountainMan Wrote:Actually, this would be the proper saying in German: Wenn es regnet, gießt es.
That is the correct translation word by word but it makes no sense to my German ears. That is typical for sayings where word by word translation is misleading at best.
A frequent used example is the German saying: to be "schwer auf Draht". That translates: to be "heavy on wire" and makes no sense to you, right? It means someone is clever
This is a page full of German sayings with totally useless word by word English translations:
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.heime-world.de/kurioses/englisch.htm">http://www.heime-world.de/kurioses/englisch.htm</a><!-- m --> Have fun how we can ruin your language
..,,and , Reinhard , I'm sure our English sayings don't make much sense when translated into German
T
IN MY ROOM IS A TRAIN, AND WHEN I DON'T BECOME ANOTHER CEILING, I WILL UNDRESS!
In meinem Zimmer zieht es, und wenn ich keine weitere Decke bekomme, ziehe ich aus!
say what ????????
teejay Wrote:IN MY ROOM IS A TRAIN, AND WHEN I DON'T BECOME ANOTHER CEILING, I WILL UNDRESS!
In meinem Zimmer zieht es, und wenn ich keine weitere Decke bekomme, ziehe ich aus!
say what ????????
In meinem Zimmer zieht es = In my room is a terrible draft
wenn ich keine weitere Decke bekomme = If I don't get another blanket
ziehe ich aus = I will move out
The trick is
Zug = train OR draft
Decke = ceiling OR blanket
ausziehen = undress OR move out
There was a joke about the "first English-Russian computer translator" which claimed that the expression "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" translated and then translated back came out "The Vodka is good but the meat is rotten".
I had a bit of fun last year. We went up Pike's Peak (on the train, of course!) with a cousin and his German girlfriend. She spotted a marmot and I said "Ein Murmultier." Not a common vocabulary word? But there is an idiom "Wie ein Murmultier schlafen" -- to sleep like a marmot.
About five miles south of where we live is a large Morton Salt facility. There's a large elevator moving salt into big piles and there are pallets with bags of salt everywhere. I often wondered why was there a salt processing factory right in the middle of the Arizona desert, and where did they get the salt from since there were no large trucks or any railroad siding there. Recently, I learned that there is a large deposit of salt in the area and they are actively mining it since around 1969. There is some 15 cubic miles of salt there, they say the deposits could be almost two miles deep. There are no open pits or tunnels, but what they do is inject water through the center of double-walled pipes, then pump up the brine through the outer wall to dry in the Arizona sun. This salt is used for water softeners, roads and other industrial uses, but not as table salt.
I know, it's not sensational news, but I thought it was strange to find a salt mine here in the desert, hundreds of miles from either the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean.
Makes sense to me... the Great Salt Lake... Salt Lake City... the Salt Flats where the most level race track in country is... it never occurred to me before though, why so much salt? Is it sea salt from a long gone prehistoric ocean?
Actually , the table salt i use , and have used over the years is mined right here in Windsor Ontario . The salt mine is actually situated in the town of Amherstburg , about 10 miles from Windsor , and on the Detroit River .....but is called " Windsor Salt ". There was a railroad involved with it ...maybe I should be modelling that !?
T
Something that really amazes me is what I've learned from bringing this up. Ever since moving to the west side of the valley, I noticed black tank cars coming in and out of the area and sometimes sitting on a siding that runs along Grand Ave. (US60). There's a spur that heads west a few miles south of us that cuts across Grand Ave. I frequently see these cars lined up along this spur as well, and I never knew why until now. Apparently, these cars contain LPG which is stored in the space left open in that Morton's salt mine that I was talking about. It kind of makes sense, but I never put the two together. I also found where there are other active salt mines in Arizona. A large one up around Holbrook and another outside of Kingman. A geology site says that there are more that have not been tapped.
It could be, like the Great Salt Lake, these deposits were a result of Arizona being underwater a very long time ago. According to that site, that was some 245 million years ago. It just occurred to me, but the valley where Phoenix and surrounding towns are located is called the Salt River Valley, and the Salt River runs right down through the center of town. Gee, what a coincidence, I always wondered why they called it that since the river isn't salty when it runs, which is only occasionally when the open the gates at Roosevelt Dam upstream.
Enough geography for one day, I was never good at that anyway.
faraway Wrote:ngauger Wrote:....When it rains (humid) - it (still) pours....
Thank you! I knew it was not a matter of proper translation and you told me the story behind it
MountainMan Wrote:Actually, this would be the proper saying in German: Wenn es regnet, gießt es.
That is the correct translation word by word but it makes no sense to my German ears. That is typical for sayings where word by word translation is misleading at best.
A frequent used example is the German saying: to be "schwer auf Draht". That translates: to be "heavy on wire" and makes no sense to you, right? It means someone is clever
This is a page full of German sayings with totally useless word by word English translations:
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.heime-world.de/kurioses/englisch.htm">http://www.heime-world.de/kurioses/englisch.htm</a><!-- m --> Have fun how we can ruin your language
I grew up in post-war Germany playing with German kids and speaking German as a second language.
Translating expressions into Old German makes no sense to me. The purpose of "translating" is to render both the words and the meaning behind the words into a similarity in the other language.
You wouldn't do well with the sayings from the original Farmer's Almanac in Old English, either, although they made perfect sense two centuries or more ago.
Try translating this into German and keeping meaning and context intact:
"Talk's cheap, but good whiskey costs money." Do you understand this old truism from the gold mines of the Sierra Nevadas? I grew up with it and many others, because that's where my family began life in America back in 1839.
And why is it that the old actors' expression "break a leg" translates quite well into "Hals und Beinbruch?"
teejay Wrote:Actually , the table salt i use , and have used over the years is mined right here in Windsor Ontario . The salt mine is actually situated in the town of Amherstburg , about 10 miles from Windsor , and on the Detroit River .....but is called " Windsor Salt ". There was a railroad involved with it ...maybe I should be modelling that !?
T
If you move the access to the mine a bit, you could have the "Sandwich Salt Mines"
Yes, nurse, I'm coming.