I’ve been learning Danish for a few years, mainly through Duolingo. Why? Because I used to work for an Anglo-Danish company and thought it might help. It didn’t, really, but it did help sometimes when I was over there to be able to read signs and notices.
Like any language there are many idioms, some explicable (det blæser en halv pelikan- it’s blowing half a pelican; it’s very windy) some a bit more specialised (der er en Ko på isen – literally “there’s a cow in the ice” meaning this is a tricky situation).
One of the odder Danish expressions is “tak for kaffe”, which literally means “thanks for the coffee”, but is also a slightly old-fashioned expression of surprise. Since I heard this I’ve wondered how this came about, and I recently found out.
Danish hospitality can often mean coffee and cake or biscuits. When you leave a house, saying ‘tak for kaffe’ would be polite. So this came to mean ‘goodbye’.
It might have ended there, but ‘goodbye’ turned into ‘I’m out of here’ when a situation gets tricky. In Denmark, when the going gets tough, the tough get coffee.
From there it’s a short step to saying ‘goodbye’ (or ‘tak for kaffe’) when you’re in a situation you don’t want to be in, such as being surprised or frustrated.
“Get me out of here!” becomes “I want to say goodbye to this!” and so “Tak for Kaffe!”
There are similar expressions in English. My mum would say “Well, I’ll go to our house,” when she was surprised. This really confused me when I was little, especially when she said it when we were at home. “You’re already in our house,” I’d say. I could be very literally-minded.
This is similar to “I’ll go to the foot of our stairs”, which I’ve never heard except in a Monty Python sketch set in a language lab. (Michael Palin, an actual Yorkshireman, being given direction from Graham Chapman, from Leicester).
