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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Funny that the 1st Extreme Ironing World Championships were held in a country (Germany) where the native language has no word for the concept of “silly”. :D

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Doch! Of course we have a - or actually some - words for that. The above-mentioned, but what could also fit is "absurd". Most of the time we have even multiple words with slightly different meanings - it's why I like our language :D

But bügeln is less ironic which kind of ruins much of the appeal.

Albern, Dumm, Lächerlich? German has words for silly and the concept of silly.

No, parent is right. There is no word for silly in german.

Instead, all german words pertaining to silly, also have an untranslatable connotation, a flavour to them, such as "silly, but with a deep undertone of contemplative thought as to how I ended up in this predicament", and so forth.

But then is 'silly' translatable into any other language at all? With all its exact meanings, and nothing more?

so ein quatsch!

No single German word is equivalent to all of the English language uses of the word "silly". There are however individual German words for the English contextual equivalents.

https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/1227/how-to-expre...

Extreme ironing used to be fun sport but when Rowenta started sponsoring the UK team in the championships it's now only "commercial sponsorship and exploitation"

http://www.ntk.net/2002/09/13/?l=92#l

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