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German expression of the day
Mar. 14th, 2023 08:04 pm 'Vorsicht ist die Mutter der Porzellankiste.'
A slight detour from my usual stomping grounds. 'Caution is the mother of the box of porcelain' implying that carefulness will keep the china safe. 'Better safe than sorry' might be the idiomatic English rendering. The German phrase may be a distant descendant of Falstaff's "the better part of valour is discretion".
Oddly, I encountered it while playing Mass Effect 3: it's one of Shepard's possible responses to Dr Chakwas when she tells him he needs a medical check-up. I say oddly because computer game localisations mostly stick to fairly neutral language, avoiding the more entertaining corners of the language – dialect, proverbs, sayings etc. We rarely get Bavarian or Saxon or Berlin-accented characters. Or not to an extent strong enough for me to notice.
A slight detour from my usual stomping grounds. 'Caution is the mother of the box of porcelain' implying that carefulness will keep the china safe. 'Better safe than sorry' might be the idiomatic English rendering. The German phrase may be a distant descendant of Falstaff's "the better part of valour is discretion".
Oddly, I encountered it while playing Mass Effect 3: it's one of Shepard's possible responses to Dr Chakwas when she tells him he needs a medical check-up. I say oddly because computer game localisations mostly stick to fairly neutral language, avoiding the more entertaining corners of the language – dialect, proverbs, sayings etc. We rarely get Bavarian or Saxon or Berlin-accented characters. Or not to an extent strong enough for me to notice.
