Quaint Idioms and Expressions of the Pennsylvania Germans

[topaz]

This is one of the booklets that keyne  is preparing to get rid of.  After looking it over I may have to veto getting rid of it.

It is by A. Monroe Aurand, Jr.  The cover page tells me that he also wrote "Little Known Facts About the Amish and the Mennonites", "Little Known Facts About Bundling in the New World", &c.  (I can barely imagine what the "&c" might include.)

Some of the words in here have entered the common lexicon -- "slobber", "dunk", "dummkopf", "befuddle".  Some, well...

"Don't be so darn DOBBICH."
"Now I'm FERSHPRITZED!"
"Don't K'NOATCH the cat so!"
"Teacher was so FARTZOON'D at the way the boys behaved when the superintendent came."
"My man G'SHNORRIX'D so loud he waked up everybody."
"Kids at that age are so NIXNOOTZICH."

I'm going to have to start using these around work.

"Dude, take a look at this function Jon wrote.  I love it!  It's totally MARICKWAERDICH."
"Oh, crud, not another NIDDERTRECHTICHA netdeploy bug."
"Yeah, you can go ahead and use that machine.  It's all OUSGABOOTZ'D."

Edit: keyne informs me that she already promised this treasure to beowabbit. It's a relatively short pamphlet -- I'll probably just Xerox a copy to save for myself. :-)


Edit 2: The full text is available online! I can't think why I didn't Google for it in the first place.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I have a lovely gem of a book titled Die schoenste Laengvidge which is studded with examples of promiscuous English-German code-switching from the early years of the 20th century. (I particularly like "Dann wird bei uns hausgecleant.") Mencken also has some plum examples in The American language.