German Language Stack Exchange is a bilingual question and answer site for speakers of all levels who want to share and increase their knowledge of the German language. It's 100% free, no registration required.
Sign up to join this community
This sentence of the "Am ende" lyric belonging to 'OK Kid' doesn't make sense for me:
lieber voll verkacken als schon im Ansatz scheiße.
Apparently it has a vulgar utterance literally, but I want to know to what verkacken and scheiße point in the background not only literally?
This are not really metaphors, just idioms:
etwas verkacken = to screw up s.th.
Kacke = shit, crap
etwas ist scheiße = s.th. is shitty
ansetzen = to start doing something
im Ansatz = at the outset, from the beginning (and other meanings)
So one could translate it as
It's better to totally screw something up then to do it shittily from the beginning
