Don't Swap Horses in the Middle of a Stream. On the History of a German-American Saying

• Published in: Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik Vol. 33; no. 1; pp. 106 - 124
• Main Author: Mieder, Wolfgang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: German
• Published: 01.01.2005
• ISSN: 0301-3294

While scholars have thus far primarily concerned themselves with the linguistic borrowing of individual words between the German & Anglo-American languages, there clearly are also examples of proverbs that are taken over from one linguistic culture to the other. This is certainly the case with the proverb-pair "Mitten im Strom soll man die Pferde nicht wechseln / Don't swap horses in the middle of the stream." Until now it has been assumed that the proverb originated with Abraham Lincoln, but it is more likely that German immigrants of the first half of the nineteenth century carried the not particularly well known proverb to America with them. After Lincoln employed it in English translation in 1864 during his reelection campaign, the proverb became very popular in the United States. As can be seen from numerous contextualized references found in the German mass media, the English version of the proverb has now been "reborrowed" into the German language by way of loan translations. Both lexicographers & paremiographers have now registered it as a German proverb, usually with reference to Lincoln. By now it has gained an impressive currency in German political rhetoric, just as it continues to be used in American political speech or whenever an argument is being made against change in any type of leadership. References. Adapted from the source document