If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. Standing still is falling behind. Plateaued. Stuck in the same role. Career stagnation.
American vocabulary treats the absence of advancement as an active condition requiring diagnosis, not as a settled state.
Literally: able to be travelled after. To be nachvollziehbar is to be such that another person can walk the same path and arrive at the same place.
English translates it as understandable or comprehensible, which loses the whole point. Those words describe a state in the listener. Nachvollziehbar describes a property of the reasoning — it can be retraced.
An argument that persuades but cannot be retraced has failed.
Worth its price. The German word for something that is good value, and it is built from Preis and wert. Not cheap. Not a bargain. Worth what it costs, which is a different and higher claim.
The calculation path. In German schools the Rechenweg is marked, not only the answer. A correct result with no working shown earns little or nothing, and a wrong result reached by sound method earns partial credit.
Every German adult sat through years of this. The habit of asking how you got there is taught before the age of ten.
The modern German word for cheap, and it is rarely a compliment. Billigware, cheap goods. Eine billige Ausrede, a cheap excuse. Billiglohn, low wages.
The word once meant fair and proportionate — it survives in that sense only in recht und billig. Somewhere along the way, the German word for equitable became the German word for inferior.
German organisations give the technically competent function authority over how its work is done, and the phrase das ist Sache der Fachabteilung — that is the specialist department’s affair — settles a question by naming who owns it.
The price-performance ratio. A standard German compound with no clean English equivalent — value for money is close and carries a different logic, because it asks what you got for what you paid rather than whether the two correspond. The German word treats price and performance as two quantities in a defined relationship. A good ratio can be expensive.
An American term for a position in a market rather than a number on a label. Products are designed to a price point, which means the specification is derived from the price rather than the price from the specification.
American companies restructure frequently, and the restructuring is usually about who controls which market, product line or customer segment. The process documentation is rewritten afterwards to match. It follows the settlement rather than constituting it.
To grab the evil by the root.
Not cut, not treat, not manage. Grab. And not the plant — the root.