Talk:hammer

German

German sense awesome? das Lied ist der Hammer, das Lied ist hammer are some quick google searches. 81.68.255.36 17:43, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

I think the modern vernacular says the song is the bomb. (Lied and Hammer are capitalized in German). —Stephen (Disc) 19:13, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Erm, yeah I capitalized them. Anyway, I've seen both German hammer and Hammer, so I think they really do mean noun and adjective. I'm not a German youth (I can't imagine my uncle to say it lol), so I can't really tell, though. 81.68.255.36 22:29, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

No, the ones spelled hammer are just misspellings. Adjectives take special adjectival suffixes, so the only way hammer could be an adjective would be if the basic word were "hamm" (it’s not). There are Germans who don’t bother to type correctly just as there are Americans who use "i" and "u" as pronouns. —Stephen (Disc) 01:59, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Roger. Kinda stupid of me not to think about the suffixes, yeah. 81.68.255.36 17:03, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Stephen's reasoning is muddled and completely incorrect. The dropping of the article, correlating quite conspicuously with the lower-case spelling as it does, indicates that this is not a mere spelling error. For example, schade was also once a noun (der Schade, a side-form of der Schaden) and is now used as a predicative (non-comparable) adjective. (There's no requirement at all for German adjectives to have certain suffixes, and by the way, -er is not one of them, as it is the marker of the comparative, not a derivation suffix. Many common German adjectives are monomorphemic. Nor do German adjectives form a closed class; there is no reason why newly formed adjectives cannot be monomorphemic, as well. Zero derivation is effectively possible, as the example schade shows.) So it is not without precedent to turn a noun into an adjective by dropping the article (and spelling the adjectivised noun with lower case); it's a typical road of grammaticalisation. Like das Lied ist toll, das Lied ist scheiße, das Lied ist super, das Lied ist kacke, thus das Lied ist hammer. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 03:21, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

(transitive verb): work hard at

(transitive verb): to work hard, determinedly, and steadily at something
hammering away at the new novel
Microsoft® Encarta® 2009

.