Heidegger was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. You quoted one of his technical terms used in his works on existential philosophy, “Dasein” (please note that all German nouns as a rule are beginning with an initial capital letter). Dasein literally would translate as “being there” (better: the fact being there at all, just the mere fact of existence. A second technical term he used was “Sosein” (literally “so-being”, referring to the quality of existence, the way in which a person or an object exists).

From a linguistic point of view, there are languages like English, French or German that do not distinguish between these two fundamental aspects of existence. You would use a word like “is” to denote both the fact and the quality of existence in sentences like “He is there” (fact of existence) and “He is a student” or “he is dead” (quality of existence). It’s the same in a classical language like Latin.

Other languages like, for example, Chinese or Korean have developed grammatical traits that, following the logically essentially differentation of both these aspects of existence, distinguish accordingly not only at lexical but also at grammatical level. In case of fact of existence, Chinese would use a special verb like 在 zài denoting location (as a sub-variant of fact of existence) than it would in a sentence like “he is a student” where 是 shì would be used. There are also other linguistic data in Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese suggesting the same.

Funny enough, such language data are in full support of Heidegger’s two-fold approach, but they developed long before Heidegger ever stated them.

In this light, your statement that Heidegger held that “a hammer is only a hammer when hammering” clearly refers to the quality of existence. However, to infer that Silverboy is only Silverboy when “silverboying” on here is quite another thing.

Long live beer house philosophy!....lol