Nothing is sacred

I'm sure German can be a poetic language when it wants to be, yet it is a language of unexpectedly limited vocabulary. This is ironic, given that German allows speakers to invent new words by smashing multiple old ones together; but German ran out of phonetic Ur-combinations some time ago. Thus it has to use the same word, die Dichtung, to mean both poetry (hail Goethe, hail Schiller, hail Heine) and gasket (hail exhaust manifold, hail intake air duct).

Granted, English does the same thing. Take the noun key, for example, which can be both something to unlock a door (der Schlüssel) and something to affect sound production in a musical instrument (die Taste).

Still, you'd think concepts like poetry are sacred enough that the Volk would have found a different word/concept to share with gasket--say, das Radieschen (radish) or der Elch (elk). Maybe gaskets were invented before verse.

If poetry is not sacred enough, what is? We merely need turn to the word for mother--die Mutter--to learn that nothing is. Die Mutter means both mother and screw nut. The crass English double meanings of screw and nut perhaps highlight that I shouldn't be too critical of German. Still, mother and nut?

German reserves der Vater solely for male progenitors, so maybe we can simply blame all of this on The Patriarchy.