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Word of the Week: Eierlegende Wollmilchsau

Picture this: a pig, covered in fluffy fur, that lays eggs and gives
out milk. The image you have in your head right now is this week's
word of the week, the Eierlegende Wollmilchsau, which could roughly
be translated as "egg-laying wool-milk-sow". While this little
creature may sound like a bit of a freak of nature, it is every
farmer's wet dream: the perfect farm animal, uniting the qualities of
chickens (laying eggs), sheep (producing wool), cows (giving out
milk) and pigs (can be turned into bacon). The Eierlegende
Wollmilchsau produces all the daily necessities and is tasty to boot,
it is an animal that only has good sides to it. It goes without
saying that this creature doe not exist.

Disappointed? Don't be! While the Eierlegende Wollmilchsau may not
literally exist as a cuddly, yummy and useful creature, it does exist
in the figurative sense. The Eierlegende Wollmilchsau is a single
tool or a person that attempts to do the work of many, like a jack of
all trades or the literal egg-laying wool-milk-sow. Needless to say,
finding such a versatile tool or person is almost as hard as finding
the mythical creature.

And so the Eierlegende Wollmilchsau is nowadays mostly used to
describe some unachievable ideal, proving that Germans not only have
a finely tuned sense of irony, but are also more creative than given
credit for. A perfect example of an ironic use of Eierlegende
Wollmilchsau would be a job advertisement with so many, varied
qualifications that no real person could ever hope to fulfill them
all.

However, with the incredible development of new technologies, it is
entirely conceivable that  the word might take on a new meaning. In
the past, the closest thing to a real  Eierlegende Wollmilchsau was
the Swiss Army knife, but it looks like the word will be put to
excellent use to describe the new generation of smartphones. Whether
smartphone companies would be delighted to know that their products
are being described as an "egg-laying wool-milk-sow" is a different
question altogether.

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[87f42]Author GermanyinUSAPosted on October 28, 2011January 25, 2018
Categories Word of the Week

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