Stop egging around!

I've always found eggs very funny. Don't know exactly why, probably because they are round and, somehow, perfect. That's also how I feel about some words.

I guess that's what I like so much about today's favourite word. It's in Austrian dialect, which I've always been told one cannot write, but I'll give it a shot. The word is umaeiern.

uma is the Austrian rendition of the High German herum (meaning "around"). Ei means "egg". Umaeiern (or herumeiern) means something like to waffle, to mess about, like in "Tats nicht so umaeiern und entscheidet ihr euch doch!" ("Stop messing about and take a decision already!"). A literal translation, as usual, does not work well. "To egg around" sounds really funny, though!



Incidentally, in Spanish one would say "marear la perdiz" (lit. "to make the partridge sick"). How about that?