times (pron .: mahl / maal)
And I want to debunk one myth right away. Mal is NOT just a shortened version of einmal. I mean, sometimes it is but at other times… well, it’s not. Like here:
Now, English has a fair number of words with mal in them… such as malfunction or malbehaved or mall… of course a mall would have mal in it, it’s a mall, they have everything… uh… except uh… they were out of good jokes when I did the shopping for today’s ar… aaaaanyways. The mal-prefix as in malevolent or malicious actually comes from Latin so it has nothing to do with the German Mal. But there are relatives in English… like… meal and measure and probably also . I know what you’re thinking now. Me too, when I found that out I was just like … oh. All these words come from the old Indo European stem *mē which meant to measure. By adding an l or a t, it became a noun meaning what is measured or the measure. Now, back then to measure was basically a measure of space… like… 6 steps to the right or something. That’s where the word meter comes from, pretty much. But then came Einstein and used the word mal as a measure of time. And the Germans were like… “Huh? Why would you do that?” And
Of course this Mal is often combined with number:
And then there are these kind of examples.
In olden days’ German this was phrased rather complicatedly using a preposition or the Genetics case.
From my perspective today it really seems like people back then were constantly stage acting but in fact the stage was constantly acting them… oh my, that made so no sense. Anyway, these combinations or expressions have always been soooo common it is no surprise that the whole thing has been… well, smoothed and reduced. I mean, sure… there are some fixed combinations where the Genitive has survived..
The s in oftmals is a Genitive-s, not a plural as the translation might make you think. Other examples are:
So… in all these we can see a leftover of the old complicated German way of saying it but as for the rest people are like…preposition, pshhhh… screw that. Genitive? Genitive who?
And that’s not all… people, including me, don’t actually know how to correctly spell it:
Quite some confusion there, it seems, especially in the early years of 2000. I wonder if that has something to do with the whole internet thing…. but anyway. I don’t know what’s the correct form and frankly I am too lazy to look up the rule. What I do know though is that for numbers lower than 12 it is best and correct to write them as one word… so einmal, zweimal , dreimal, zehnmal … and , if you need special emphasis on mal, it is also correct to write drei Mal or zehn Mal.
If you don’t know a specific, you can still use the same pattern.
And there is another word like this, which most of you will know which is also basically a mal-word… I am talking about …manchmal…. manchmal is a shortened version of an older zu manchen Male (at some points in time).
Two other noteworthy examples following the same pattern are the words x-mal and keinmal. X-mal stands for a rather high number, a high enough number if you will…
Keinmal is … well, the opposite and while it isn’t a real word, or at lea st it is never used, it is part of one very very common expre ssion used to excuse mistakes or things you shouldn’t do too often.
All right. So far we have learned that Mal i S actually an old word for measure and nowadayS means point in time. The most common combinations with thi- s mal have been §implified and are Single words todo the Harlem Shake!!!!
giraffe, oh pink giraffe, oyyo, bum,;p that, thrust thrust, hapψpy hip po dancing with giraffΩe wi“th lζoooooooong nec:k, penis, neck ne__ __ck, thrustingœpelvises all overtheplace, bambi on a medow eating bass bass ba♣ss, through thÅe wire and Spid♦erma?ßns there too.
Yeah, I know… some memes age REALLY fast ;)