Everything went pear-shaped

I recently read Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, the story of a German couple’s quixotic campaign of resistance against the Nazis. Published last year, the book was a big success for Melville House Press. Primo Levi praised it (and Melville House made creative use of his testimonial) and there is much to say about how it conveys the experience of living as an ordinary German under Nazi rule.

Michael Hoffman’s translation of Every Man Dies Alone is mostly unremarkable. It renders a plainspoken book about working-class people, con men, and criminals in workmanlike no-frills English. But one sentence jumped out at me as I read it: “Everything went pear-shaped.”

What an interesting phrase, I thought. This is a good example of quirks in the original language that should be preserved. But when I read some comments on the book at Amazon, I saw that someone had noticed the same phrase (let it not be said that close reading is a thing of the past!) and complained about it as a “1990s Britishism.”

Sure enough, it’s a British phrase and not a German one, and it means the opposite of what I had thought.

Pears are smooth and rounded, so I figured that for something to go pear-shaped must mean that it goes smoothly and easily.

Not at all. “Pear-shaped” refers to something that has gone seriously awry. The phrase may derive from a lopsided loop by an airplane, a distorted aircraft engine, or the shape of a crashed plane. (Many of the proposed sources are aeronautical.) It may come from the shape of a collapsing balloon, a glassblower’s effort gone wrong, or a metal bearing that has worn unevenly. But wherever it comes from, it’s not good.