Comment by devindotcom

12 hours ago

>attempted improvement that only makes things worse

Unless I'm mistaken, Russian has a wonderful idiom for this: "bear job"

7 comments

devindotcom

Reply
remuskaos  12 hours ago

That actually also exists in German! Bärendienst, although it is not 100% the same as Verschlimmbesserung.

  • lelandfe  10 hours ago

    Google sez: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bear_and_the_Gardener#Idio...

    > The story... relates how a solitary gardener encounters a lonely bear and they decide to become companions. One of the bear's duties is to keep the flies off his friend when he takes a nap. Unable to drive off a persistent fly, the bear seizes a paving stone to crush it and kills the gardener as well

    > [..]

    > The fable has given to the French language the idiom le pavé de l'ours (the bear's paving stone) and to German Bärendienst (a bear's service), both used for doing somebody or something a disservice or bad turn and sometimes for any ill-considered action with an unfortunate result. The Danish and Norwegian word bjørnetjeneste (bear-service) has similar meanings and the idiom also appears in other European languages.

    Apparently the source of Russian's, too: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B5...

ivan_gammel  11 hours ago

It‘s „bear service“, and context is slightly different. You do bear service to someone, and Verschlimmbesserung is on something. Both signal intent to do something good, but doing bear service is an act of screwing up while doing that, no prior condition required, and Verschlimmbesserung is the outcome of such attempt applied to something that was ok before.