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Delmobile Posted 18 years ago
Vocabulary
question from a native speaker
My daughter is reading All Quiet on the Western Front for school, and she's come across something neither one of us can make out...and for the first time ever, Google is failing me.
One of the characters has said something the others consider to be foolish, and another character tells him, "Four and a half-wit make seven." We get that it's a rebuke of some kind, especially since the next sentence is, "You've got a maggot in your brain." But what in the world does it mean? The only guess I have is some kind of skewed math--ordinarily, four and one make five, but if you've got a half-wit in the crowd, they make seven (?)
Can anyone help?
One of the characters has said something the others consider to be foolish, and another character tells him, "Four and a half-wit make seven." We get that it's a rebuke of some kind, especially since the next sentence is, "You've got a maggot in your brain." But what in the world does it mean? The only guess I have is some kind of skewed math--ordinarily, four and one make five, but if you've got a half-wit in the crowd, they make seven (?)
Can anyone help?
Top answer
Hi, Sounds like a pretty good interpretation to me. Clive
- Hi, Sounds like a pretty good interpretation to me.
- Clive
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5 Answers
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Yes, a half-wit can twist the rules of math to fit anything ....
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Thanks. I wonder if this is a literal translation of some common German expression?
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I received the following from a native speaker of German. He is Swiss.
I found the passage in the German original ("Im Westen nichts neues"): "Verrückt und drei macht sieben" ("Crazy and three is seven"). It means someting like "You are crazy" or "This is crazy". It is as far as I know an out-dated expressen (though it is normally "Verrückt und drei macht neune") from Berlin dialect.
I found the passage in the German original ("Im Westen nichts neues"): "Verrückt und drei macht sieben" ("Crazy and three is seven"). It means someting like "You are crazy" or "This is crazy". It is as far as I know an out-dated expressen (though it is normally "Verrückt und drei macht neune") from Berlin dialect.
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Thanks, Philip. It makes more sense to me expressed literally, oddly enough. I mean, it sounds crazier 
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