Expat Win

You gotta love it when you're reading a book about your Swabian neighbors and the writer includes a line in the Swabian dialect that you totally understand:

"Wenn er frech wird, dann hau i em abrr eine!"

("Wenn er frech wird, dann haue ich ihm aber eine!" or in English "If he screws with me, I'll give him one in the kisser!").

But when you look at the Hochdeutsch translation provided by the writer...

"Wenn er frech wird, dann ziehe ich ihm eins über!"

...you know you wouldn't have understood it.

Translating into English, I would have thought the Hochdeutsch line meant "...then I'll pull one over on him", which would mean to pull a prank on him. Not the same.

OMG...I'm getting there!

Unless you're an expat, you have no idea how much this means.