Pappsatt sein - Being stuffed
News News blog
In German there is a saying „pappsatt sein“. „Pappe“ means cardboard and „satt“ means „full, stuffed“.
Well, If you have eaten cardboard, you're bound to be stuffed. Or are you?
Being stuffed (pappsatt) has nothing to do with cardboard. Papp is an old German word for a child's porridge, and it is also a word for "glue". In Dutch, there is also the word "pap" for "porridge". So if a child had eaten a lot of porridge, he or she was stuffed.
But there is also the term "pappen" in the sense of "to eat" or "to feed with porridge". The term is still used today in the idiom "happenpappen" and then means "to eat" or as a noun "Happenpappen" and then means "food".
In contrast, however, the German word „Pappe“ for cardboard actually comes from porridge. We have been saying „Pappe“ since the 18th century because paper is made from a pulpy mass and the individual layers used to be glued together with paste by the bookbinder.
