So, some German lexicographers have welcomed the English phrase “shitstorm” into their national lexicon, calling it the “Anglicism of the Year.”
“Shitstorm fills a gap in the German vocabulary that has become apparent through changes in the culture of public debate,” the jury of language experts said.
Apparently shitstorm gained popularity last year in connection with the financial crisis in Greece—a crisis fueled by reckless German lenders and which is now being fixed by German leaders.
Anyway, what’s surprising to me about this story is that the Germans had a shit-related gap in their vocabulary to begin with.
As Michael Lewis noted late last year in Vanity Fair, the Germans have a bit of a fascination with doody, and they don’t lack for scatological words and phases.
[The] Germans have been on the receiving end of many scholarly attempts to understand their collective behavior. In this vast and growing enterprise, a small book with a funny title towers over many larger, more ponderous ones. Published in 1984 by a distinguished anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality. Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass).… Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech—all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.”
He then proceeded to pile up a shockingly high stack of evidence to support his theory. There’s a popular German folk character called der Dukatenscheisser (“The Money Shitter”), who is commonly depicted crapping coins from his rear end. Europe’s only museum devoted exclusively to toilets was built in Munich. The German word for “shit” performs a vast number of bizarre linguistic duties—for instance, a common German term of endearment was once “my little shit bag.” The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a “Purgation-Calendar.” Then there are the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings: “As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!,” to select but one of the seemingly endless examples.
Read more: Its the Economy, Dummkopf! | Vanity Fair