Social work

Durchs Raster fallen is the German for falling through the cracks, and the picture behind it says something the English leaves unsaid. Das Raster is a grid: the screen that breaks a printed photograph into dots, the squares of a timetable, the set of criteria a form sorts people by. A net catches whatever is too big for its holes. A grid does something colder — it sorts, and whoever matches none of its boxes is simply not caught. That is why the idiom sits so naturally in social work, where help is paid for under headings: a young man who is too old for youth services, has no registered address and no diagnosis can fall through all of them at once. The same noun gives in kein Raster passen, to fit no category, and a caseworker who hears that said about a client knows what the next month will look like.