German expressions with a color to brighten up your life

8 colorful German idioms

'Paint everything gray in gray'

This list of German "color" idioms begins with the achromatic, very neutral and boring gray. When Germans say that someone is painting everything gray in gray ("alles grau in grau malen") it means that the person is being pessimistic. The word "gray" is repeated twice in the expression. Doesn't that make the pessimist in question sound rather like a realist?

8 colorful German idioms

'That's not the yellow of an egg'

Germans have a particular relationship with the egg and for many, the round, bright yellow, yummy yolk can't be topped as the highlight of a breakfast. So if someone says that something is "nicht das Gelbe vom Ei" (not the egg yolk), it means that it's not as perfect as it could be.

8 colorful German idioms

'To be blue' / 'to make blue'

"Blau sein" (to be blue) means to be drunk. "Blaumachen" (to make blue) is to skip work or school. Urine and alcohol used to be needed to dye clothes blue. Dyers would often drink the beer themselves first instead of just pouring it into the vats. Since the dyeing process required long waiting periods, it didn't really matter if they were too hungover to actually work the day after ...

8 colorful German idioms

'Oh, you green nine!'

"Ach, du grüne Neune!" is an expression of surprise or annoyance, kind of like "good grief!" Its origins are unclear, but one theory relates it to the fact that instead of spades, one of the suits on German playing cards is leaves, also called "green." The equivalent card in a tarot game predicts loss, sickness or other unpleasant events.

8 colorful German idioms

'The red thread'

While English doesn't add a color to "a thread of ideas," a recurring theme is described as "der roter Faden" in German. The expression was used by Goethe in his novel 'Elective Affinities': "All the rope used by the Royal Fleet, from the thickest to the thinnest, is twined in such a way that a red thread runs through all of them; it is impossible to remove the thread without undoing the rope..."

8 colorful German idioms

'Purple: The last try'

"Lila: der letzte Versuch" is an unflattering — and thankfully outdated — expression used to describe a woman who is desperate to find a partner and wears a purple dress in an attempt to seduce someone. It used to be the hue worn by single women who were too old for the young girl's pink, but later also became a color for equal rights in Germany, with purple overalls serving as a feminist symbol.

8 colorful German idioms

'To see white mice'

The English-speaking world has established "seeing pink elephants" as the standard for a drunken hallucination caused by delirium tremens (DTs), the symptoms a person feels following withdrawal from a high intake of alcohol over a long period of time. One in three people going through DTs has visions of crawling bugs or rodents. The Germans chose white mice to describe those hallucinations.

8 colorful German idioms

'To get black angry'

The expression is so idiomatic that it can now be written in a single word: "schwarzärgen." Originally referring to the discoloration of a corpse, it would be exaggerated to say that Germans only use the expression for something that makes them "angry to death." Pictured above is the German version of the Parcheesi board game, called "Mensch ärgere Dich nicht" — literally, "Don't get angry, man."

Author: Elizabeth Grenier