My favourite German word
44 comments
·July 19, 2025niemandhier
Gegenstand would probably be better translated as “a stand around”.
A “stand against” would be a Widerstand, which also exists.
Update: Interestingly the etymology is really “ stand against”, you always leans something here.
jameskilton
> That is like asking how we can make our cities better for cars, or our workplaces better for the furniture (emphasis mine)
I love this analogy and am going to use it.
This is a fantastic article. In the end, everything is still, and will always be, about people. We ignore and forget that at our peril.
Thanks!
andyferris
I have been interpretting the new "we need to write documentation for LLMs!!!" trend to REALLY mean "oh damn, we don't have ANY concise and navigable documentation at all..." (combined with the fact you can't just ignore this fact like when onboarding a human over weeks or months - LLMs have no capability to create long-term memories _except_ to create documentation artifacts to look up later).
In the end I'm hopeful about this because it means there will be more concise and navigable documentation for me to refer to (though I might be slightly offended to be reading the AGENTS.md instead of the README.md, lol)
llopium
That’s great, but gegenstand just means object, and that definition of object is part of English, e.g. “The object of having this talk is to learn about how we can do better.”
You don’t hear that said much anymore, but in the 20th century it was said fairly regularly.
card_zero
Object has "against" in it, that's the ob- part. The other part is "throw". The German comes from the Latin. (Why did they go for -stand instead of a word for throw?)
masswerk
-stand is what is (to something) or what has been established (about something). E.g., Bestand – the totality of what has been established about something, or what is available, etc. So Gegenstand is what has been established as real-world (or in extension also abstract) resistance to our objectives (so that we have to deal with it) – or, as gegen- is also vis-a-vis, what we are facing.
The Latin objectum has a directional vector (figuratively, it's thrown at us), while Gegenstand is much more inert. It's like a world view of active exploration versus a tableau of the world around us.
FearNotDaniel
Once you get into learning German, it’s surprising how many compound words like this are actually direct translations of the Latin or Greek roots of the same English words. Hydrogen = Wasserstoff (water material); television = Fernseher (distance seer) and so on. It’s almost as if they had their own uncleftish beholding moment.
lis
Not necessarily these words, but a lot of these translations stem from linguistic purism:
WalterBright
The rocket fuel for the Me-163 Komet is T-Stoff and C-Stoff. A fuel leak would dissolve the pilot.
jjtheblunt
What do you mean the German comes from the Latin?
card_zero
For instance here: https://www.dwds.de/wb/etymwb/Gegenstand
Gegenstand is in the middle of the page: "lat. obiectum", it says - "translation of Latin obiectum into philosopher-speak".
TacticalCoder
[dead]
masswerk
BTW, this also kind of works in English: we notice objects around us, because they object to our intentions, just for their inert nature. It's their resistance (German: Widerstand), which brings them to our attention. (Objects are pretty much passive-aggressive. ;-) )
pflenker
I find it mildly amusing that the article makes the following point regarding "Gegenstand":
> Objects aren’t just inert stuff – they do something.
...while many words in Germany are just "stuff" (Zeug). A plane is a Fly-Stuff (Flugzeug). A lighter is a Fire-Stuff (Feuerzeug). A vehicle is a Drive-Stuff (Fahrzeug). A toy is a Play-Stuff (Spielzeug). And the list goes on!
bryanlarsen
The first half of the essay:
> It happened astonishingly fast; within about five years a knowledge skill that I had completely taken for granted as a basic requisite in an undergraduate was diminished beyond recognition.
Then the second half
> A good way of writing documentation for human beings today will still be a good way to do it in a few years’ time.
Don't these contradict each other? Documentation that worked well for us who grew up pre-Internet is not working well for "web natives".
dmvdoug
No, because the first one isn’t talking about writing documentation. It’s talking about knowledge discovery as a learned skill that eroded when web searching replaced how knowledge used to be sought. They actually say: even in the new-fangled domain of web searching, which you would think web natives would be better at, it’s actually people who had learned the skills and techniques of knowledge discovery pre-web who were better at finding what they were looking for. Now, why they think that is the case is a bit harder to grok, having to do with their object-oriented (sorry, sorry) view of understanding/knowledge.
Contrast that with the second quote. Good documentation could be in a dusty book in the library or in a SPA. What makes the documentation good isn’t, however, related to people’s ability to navigate information spaces.
bryanlarsen
> What makes the documentation good isn’t, however, related to people’s ability to navigate information spaces.
Then what's the point? If nobody can use the documentation properly, then the term "good documentation" is meaningless.
card_zero
I think the article is saying that good documentation is objective, and is not defined by ease of use. You will ingest this difficult documentation and you will like it, because it is good for you.
You might reasonably ask "in what way".
> this is how documentation is, because this arrangement is part of its integrity, and this is how you must learn to use it and work with it.
The word "integrity" comes up six times. Something about integrity.
jhoechtl
Aufstand, Unterstand, Verstand, Umstand.
In german we have some of those -stand words.
usr1106
Abstand, Widerstand, Vorstand, Mittelstand, probably the list can be continued.
Some seem to have an obvious explanation, for other it feels long-sought and more obscure. I would not over-interpret words.
FlyingSnake
Verstanden!
WalterBright
Wiederstand - resistor
WA
*Widerstand
Wider = gegen (against)
Wieder = noch einmal (again)
Kinda important to get the spelling right in context of "Gegenstand"
WalterBright
Thanks for the correction
WalterBright
Ach, du lieber zeit!
not_your_vase
You are wrong. Faultier FTW.
andyferris
I always liked "genau", for some reason.
ffsm8
Baumkuchen! (Tree-cake)
Dracophoenix
Gesamtkunstwerk
whilenot-dev
As a native german, the french Œuvre feels a bit nicer on the tongue.
xnx
Backpfeifengesicht
juujian
Waschbär is another great one.
valenterry
Umfahren - because it's one of the few German words that changes meaning based on pronounciation - and in a very important way.
I loved this article.
My fiancée recently remarked that she'd been doing more writing on paper because it made her more productive. She theorized that she takes an editor's mindset in the face of WYSIWYG renditions of her spelling mistakes. The same goes for her design work. The industry tools make it too easy to recognize "wrong" as it's happening. That sounds like a singing endorsement of these tools, but our experience working with lower-tech tools has informed a different conclusion. You're not being "helped" to see "wrong" in what you do, you're being cut off. Your generative, creative mode is being inhibited.