Timeline for A German equivalent for "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 4, 2023 at 15:57 | vote | accept | RDBury | ||
| Nov 4, 2023 at 15:57 | comment | added | RDBury | As usual, the hardest part of asking a question here is deciding which answer to accept; it's almost always a community effort. This seems to be the winner in terms of being the most informative overall though. | |
| Nov 4, 2023 at 10:47 | comment | added | Kroltan | "I fixed it until it broke"? | |
| Nov 4, 2023 at 8:55 | comment | added | RDBury | PS. I just saw a video with a native German's take on the US opioid crisis. It struck me that the there has been a lot of "Verschlimmbessern" going here, from Nixon's "War on Drugs" to doctors prescribing opioids for relatively minor pain. It was pretty much the same with Prohibition. Perhaps English really needs a word like "Verschlimmbessern". | |
| Nov 4, 2023 at 0:09 | comment | added | RDBury | "Verschlimmbessern" seems applicable in similar situations, but as you said, it's a verb and not a proverb. On the other hand, I don't know of an English equivalent of "verschlimmbessern" other than to write out "damage while trying to improve". The closest I could come up with is "the cure is worse than the disease". | |
| Nov 3, 2023 at 22:13 | comment | added | Mark Foskey | Nice word to learn! Some day someone will ask on the English Language exchange what a good one-word translation for verschlimmbessern is and the answer will be that there isn't one but there is a phrase that doesn't quite fit but covers a similar idea. | |
| Nov 3, 2023 at 11:35 | history | answered | Hubert Schölnast | CC BY-SA 4.0 |