Wir zerbrechen uns den Kopf, um das Problem zu lösen.

This is currently translated “We beat our brains to solve this problem.” but it might be better to translate this “We are beating our brains…” because “beat” is ambiguous about whether it is past or present tense, and in English, it would be a bit unusual to speak this whole sentence and have it mean present tense.

Also, is this just me? I’m a native English speaker, and I would never say “I am beating my brain…” but rather would say “I am wracking my brain…” but it’s odd because I can’t think of a single other time I would ever use the word wrack. So to me it seems more natural and idiomatic to say “wrack”, but I’m not sure if this is just a regionalism or the dialect I grew up with.

The odd thing is that I looked it up and apparently there are two different esoteric verbs in English, “rack” and “wrack” and apparently both are valid in that construction because the idiomatic version makes intuitive sense with both words, even though they have different meanings. I have always spelled it “wrack” though.

3 Likes