/diː ˈkat͡sə ɪm ˈzak ˌkaʊ̯fn̩/ lit. ‘buy the cat in the sack’
German idiom, colloquial. To buy or agree to something without checking it first.
Draft Not yet checked by a native German speaker.
How do people use Die Katze im Sack kaufen
?
Colloquial and still very much alive, for a used car, a flat you haven’t seen or a job you took without asking enough questions. The article moves around: “die Katze im Sack”, “eine Katze im Sack”, and in warnings “kauf keine Katze im Sack”. In the past: “ich habe die Katze im Sack gekauft”.
Also said eine Katze im Sack kaufen
Die Katze im Sack kaufen
in real sentences
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Gestern habe ich die Katze im Sack gekauft.
I bought a pig in a poke yesterday.
Tatoeba, sentence by virgil, translation by U2FS, CC BY 2.0 FR
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Kauf keine Katze im Sack.
Don’t buy a pig in a poke.
Tatoeba, sentence by deniko, translation by lp233, CC BY 2.0 FR
Where does Die Katze im Sack kaufen
come from?
German Wiktionary, citing the Duden idiom dictionary, explains it with a market trick: a trader would put a worthless cat in the sack in place of the piglet, rabbit or hare the customer had paid for. Duden tells this as history, but Wikipedia notes the cat-swap story only appears in the 19th century, so it may have been invented to explain the phrase. The phrase itself is old: German Wiktionary quotes it in 19th-century writers such as Willibald Alexis and Frank Wedekind.
Mistakes learners make with Die Katze im Sack kaufen
Mixing it up with “die Katze aus dem Sack lassen” (let the cat out of the bag), which is about revealing a secret. Same cat, same sack, different idiom.
Other German idioms like Die Katze im Sack kaufen
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?
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