Whipped, muzzled

I have an American friend who is very good at languages.
He moved to Germany 7 or 8 years ago and learned the German language very quickly. He speaks it without accent and knows all kinds of phrases and idioms.
Since every language develops idiosyncrasies that are only noticeable to those who learn the language as a foreign language, he, the language athlete, likes to point out the idiosyncrasies that the German language produces.

The other day he was thinking aloud about ‘etwas vor sich herschieben’, which means ‘to put off,’ ‘to procrastinate.’
While the latter – derives from the Latin word ‘procrastinare’ – points by the prefix ‘pro’ in the direction suggested by the word ‘procrastinate’, namely forward – from the present to the future, ‘herschieben’ points in the “wrong” direction: ‘schieben’ means to ‘push’; “her” is a prefix pointing in the direction of the speaker, so that the matter of procrastination is pushed toward the person speaking, when it really should be pushed away from the person procrastinating, at least that is the idea of it.
Isn’t that so, he asked, without really waiting for my answer.
Very well observed, good for you, I verbally applauded him.

That he chose to be a translator is probably a very good decision. The career choice may not be the most challenging for him – translating is probably not his personal Mount Everest – but that’s another story.

I speak English to all my English-speaking friends, that is, friends whose native language is English. Oddly enough, with him I speak German, most of the time. I feel intimidated by him when I have to say something in English that is longer than a sentence. This friend has a built-in ticketing system that immediately and mercilessly punishes every grammatical, every syntactical error. No, it’s worse than that. I feel like being electrocuted for every mistake I make. I feel like a Pavlovian dog. Conditioned. I’m learning the hard way not to make mistakes. I know he’s just doing this to help me. So it’s a real shame that I end up feeling “whipped,” “muzzled,” unfree to express myself.