Fall

To speak of "fall" in English is to conjure a single, downward motion. The German root Fall shares this ancient ancestor, but where English sees one movement, German sees a thousand possibilities. It is the raw material for events, a piece of conceptual clay that can be shaped into almost any kind of happening. Add the prefix vor-, meaning "before" or "in front of," and you have a Vorfall—an incident, something that "falls before" your eyes. Add zu-, meaning "to" or "toward," and a Zufall is something that "falls to" you—a coincidence, a chance happening. The logic is so beautifully direct. This is a German habit English speakers already understand. We speak of a "windfall," an unexpected bounty that the wind blew down for us. We just stopped there. German keeps going, creating a Streitfall (a "strife-fall," a dispute) or an Einzelfall (a "single-fall," an isolated case). It even builds abstract nouns for qualities, like Einfallsreichtum, the richness (-reichtum) of things that "fall into" (ein-) your mind: ingenuity. From a simple verb of motion, an entire landscape of events, circumstances, and ideas takes shape.