“Let’s make a pause”

A manager once said this to her team mid-meeting. Everyone understood her instantly. Nobody blinked, nobody corrected her. The meeting just paused.

That’s the odd thing about phrases translated straight from German. They work. People get you. But somewhere along the way, you might hear the English version and feel a small jolt, like you’d been saying it wrong the whole time.

You hadn’t. You’d been saying it clearly. There’s just a slightly more common English version sitting right next to it: “Let’s take a break.“