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Comment by sidstling | Hacker News Reader

Great headline, terrible article. It mostly talks about German words and almost nothing of German work ethics. The only interesting bit is around the end where it quickly skirts over the fact that you need to make employees realize they are unproductive before you can work on their behavior.

All the other stuff is just meh. I mean, the language analysis isn’t even very good, or in depth, with terrible half-assed English translations.

Basically, don’t waste you time reading this.

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It's the opposite, the headline is just misleading. Sitzfleisch is no concept of work ethic and has no relation with productivity. It's just a casual word to describe different types of mental endurance.

Never heard about this “Sitzfleisch” thing living in Germany many many years. Young people don’t use it. Maybe it’s some old people thing?

I’m German and I am sure I’ve never used this word. Few do. Some decades ago this might have been different.

It is a word, definitely more something you would hear a teacher say than say as normal person.

It's true that it's not very much in fashion. I haven't used or heard it in decades. Might re-introduce it, though :)

As the article suggests, if you search Google for German language pages with "Sitzfleisch" and "Merkel" you will get pages of links from the last few years using the term. It could be an example of "newspaper German" like people sometimes make fun of the Frankfurter Allgemeine for.

25yo German from the ruhrarea here.

I have this Word in my active vocabulary and I'm quite surprised there are germans who don't even know it.

But more in the context of what you need for family gatherings

My family uses Sitzfleisch too, to describe a person who is always the last one to leave a party. Efficiency, productivity and work ethic are the last things on my mind if I hear someone being described as having "Sitzfleisch".

Well "Sitzfleisch" is not something the young generation is popular for, therefore probably the loss from vocabulary.

I never use it but know the word and usually when I hear it it's more negative, e.g. when you have guests who won't leave you might say that they have Sitzfleisch.

This is the only meaning of Sitzfleisch I have ever encountered. It's not a compliment at least in our house.

Interesting. I think I only ever heard the term in context with politicians that that were elected "too many times" by someone's standard. There, it certainly isn't meant positively -- the funny thing is that this goes rather well with the phrase mentioning Angela Merkel at the beginning of the article. There are more and more voices now that would prefer someone new taking her post.

This is why I come to the comments first.

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