Toast

Like English, which routinely borrows words from other languages, German readily borrows words from languages around the world. Particularly visible in modern Germany are English words affiliated with pop culture and computer technology. If you are youthful and hip, you're surely more likely to respond to a computer ad offering "50 Euro Cashback!" than to one offering "50 Euro HoweverOneExpressesCashBackInOneLongCompoundGermanWord!" Aside from the bizarre sales appeal of anything in English, my friend Martin informs me that the word Cashback had to be borrowed because Germans never conceived of the concept until English speakers brought it up: "unlike Americans," he explains, "Germans just expect to pay what things cost."

One wonders, then, what Germans did with stale bread for the several millennia before they borrowed the word Toast from English. Today, Toast is a staple of the German diet. When special company arrives unexpectedly at our door, Stefan knows to make something special to nosh on: Toast! Among the food essentials our friends Janice and Martin brought to our shared Ferienwohnung in Dresden? A package of supermarket-purchased Golden Toast! According to the package fine-print, Golden Toast is Vollkorn Toast (whole-grain toast) that is packaged--if you can believe it--untoasted, meaning that (does this really need explaining?) it isn't technically TOAST. Germans already have a word for this: it's called Brot (bread)--although Stefan says really you should use the adjective ungetoastet for this situation, which turns Brot into ungetoastete Toast. How's that for German efficiency? As far as the non-untoasted stuff goes, Stefan says the only alternative to the word Toast in German is geroestetes Brot--roasted bread--which somehow doesn't capture the actuality of, y'know, toast.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word toast comes from Old French, toster, to roast or grill, and before that, Latin *tostāre, from torrēre, to parch. The French, if not the Germans, were refined enough to understand the difference between toasting and roasting, since they bothered to borrow the latter word from Anglo-Norman (a Germanic language!) roster, to cook on an open fire.

Helen sits next to me as I type and insists that toast is a modern concept for Germans. She goes on to explain how people toasted bread in the olden days, in a flat metal contraption over an open fire or in the oven. She herself has a ganz primitiv (entirely primitive) steel bread toaster that, alas, she can't remember the name of because the concept of toast post-dates its invention.