How Jakob Pranked God

These Germans. They have a word for everything! Most of the time, that’s because the German language is a friend to compound words. You can cram any number of nouns together and pretend like that’s a normal word for something that has existed for years and you didn’t just make up. Partly, it’s also because we’ve had a lot of poets (as I am pretty sure most if not all languages do. Come on), and those guys tend to make up words when they need to, and they often end up pretty. Like when Shakespeare invented elbowing. I think.

Thanks, poets!

It wasn’t poets that left us with the words I’m introducing you to today. At least I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. I’ve tried looking into the history of today’s words, in fact, and it’s often kind of dubious, so who knows! Maybe it was poets. Isn’t it always poets, in the end.

Whoever invented them, today we will be looking at:

• a term for baby burps that is rude to farmers (sorry, farmers),
• a heated discussion about who invented everybody’s favorite food—yes, it’s finally time for us to talk about Herrgottsbescheißerle, and
• a quick surprisingly useful phrase for when you need to convince our nation’s bravest—I’m talking of course about service workers—that you are absolutely correct in tipping them 200%.

You’re Telling Me a Farmer Burped This Baby?

Babies are cute, right? Most of the things they do is cute. Sure, some of the things they do are really gross, actually, but even those are gross in kind of a cute way. Am I making sense? They’re cute, is what I’m saying. I love babies. A baby will throw up and I’ll be like, goddamn, that was adorable. Look at your little baby vom! Aww.

Well, anyway.

I wouldn’t consider myself obsessed with cute things—famously, the things I find cute are all stuff like spider babies (shout out to you, slings) and, apparently, baby vomit—but I would absolutely consider myself obsessed with diminutives. They’re fun in any language! The little -ito in Spanish? Fantastic.

In German, the most common diminutive is -chen, which often comes with changing a vowel in the original word to an umlaut. (There is also the lesser used -lein, and then, if you want to be really obnoxious, you can even combine them to -leinchen.)

The normal German word for a burp is der Rülpser, from the verb to burp, rülpsen. This will not come up again.

A baby burp, clearly, is so cute that you can’t use the regular word for burping for it. It’s like when people find out that girls poop. Babies can’t possibly burp! They’re too cute! Babies clearly do something else, like… Hmm, what would be a good word for this… They make little farmers? That’s it.

I can explain. Or, well, I actually can’t. According to Wiktionary, we aren’t super sure how this happened. But the German term for when you burp a baby, first of all, does nothing to indicate that you had anything to do with this and is considering the baby the active party (fair), and secondly, is “ein Bäuerchen machen.”

You remember what I’ve said about German diminutives. You can tell that Bäuerchen must be a diminutive of Bauer. Surely this word has something to do with burping, right? Well… Kind of? In a mean way. Der Bauer is a farmer. And… what do farmers do? They’re, like… (I’m nervously shuffling my flashcards here.) Um, they’re, like, dirty, and loud. And they burp. I mean, haha, what’s the deal with… Okay.

Well, I didn’t make it up. And some of my best friends are farmers! (Seriously, I’m friends with a long-standing farmer family in rural Bavaria.) But here we are anyway. When babies burp, they make little farmers, because that’s, apparently, cuter. By extension, farmers are cuter than normal people. Phew. Good save.

(Note: Depending on regional differences, you might also hear the other diminutive for this, Bäuerlein! I’ve never heard anyone go all the way to Bäuerleinchen, but someone definitely should.)

(One more note: all diminutives are neutral. Das Bäuerchen, ein Bäuerlein, et cetera.)

You Will Have a New Parasocial Enemy by the End of This Part

I almost didn’t want to do this one. It seemed too complex for this blog, and also, stupid. Then again, it is people arguing about food, which is one of my favorite things. So, sure. I’ll give it a go.

Initially, I only wanted to write about the word Maultasche, because I thought that was funny. A Maultasche is, like, a ravioli. Raviolo? The singular should be raviolo, right? Raviolus. Well, anyway. It’s a closed noodle pocket that’s filled with stuff. Most of the time, it contains meat, but if you’re very lucky you might encounter vegetarian ones once in a blue moon, at Aldi.

And I thought it would be funny to write about Maultasche, because it’s a compound word from Maul and Tasche. Or is it? Maul means mouth, but in a crude, maybe even animal sense, like muzzle. Horses have a Maul. Humans only have a Maul if you’re being rude. (See also: Halt’s Maul/Halt dein Maul for telling someone to shut up.) Tasche means bag. So, it would be easy to assume that a Maultasche is a Maultasche because it’s a noodle Tasche that goes into your Maul.

But it’s not! Probably. Well, we can’t be sure. You know how it is with history. It seems more likely, though, that the Maultasche comes from an old word for a slap in the face. Tatschen is an archaic word for hitting or slapping someone, and before ravioli were invented in Germany, the word Maultasche was already around. Then we started filling pasta pockets with stuff, and they looked all meaty and swollen, just like your face, after you got Maultasche’d.

So, that’s funny. That was going to be my thing, about Maultaschen. However, you can’t really talk about Maultaschen without bringing up one of the online German fandom’s favorite words, Herrgottsbescheißerle. Now, I hear you say, what? What? What??

I’ll break it down for you.

Herr = Mister

Gott = God

Herrgott = a relatively common term for God. Cute, right? Praying to Mister God. Pwease, mistew god…

Bescheißer = similarly to verscheißern, explained somewhere in this article, meaning a prankster, a deceiver

-le = another diminutive, a regional dialect of -lein

Alright, there we go. So, in the words of Justin McElroy: a funny trick to play on God! (You may also see Herrgottsbscheißerle, missing an e in there, which is just another dialect thing.)

According to legend—yes, you read that right—a monk in the monastery of Maulbronn invented the Maultasche. He did this because a thief dropped their loot in front of Jakob, this monk. So, this is the first thing you need to understand about Jakob. He was not the thief. That was someone else. Don’t even worry about it. So Jakob totally didn’t steal meat from anybody, someone else stole meat, and then conveniently dropped it at Jakob’s feet and ran off. Jakob at the time couldn’t eat meat, because there was some sort of fast going on? I don’t know, I’m not Christian. But Jakob wanted to eat this meat that he totally didn’t steal, but couldn’t do it where God would see. And, as we all know, God cannot see through pasta. Which is why Jakob chopped the meat up all fine, and then hid it in a pasta pocket, and that’s why they’re called Herrgottsbescheißerle.

Now, I will admit: based on my limited knowledge, this does seem like the silly sort of thing a Christian monk would get up to.

Inconsistencies in the story, however, are quick to arise. The legend is supposed to have transpired during the Thirty Years’ War, which was from 1618 to, you guessed it, 1648. The problem is that there were no monks at Maulbronn anymore by then. I don’t know why Maulbronn monks went extinct. I am barely holding on here.

The monastery itself, these days, admits that there is no evidence for this story anywhere, and it is only a legend. Everybody wants to have invented noodle pockets! They’re really good food! And you know Christians really need something to be proud of.

Everybody kind of did invent noodle pockets, is the thing. Italy had ravioli they could have imported up here to Germany. Poland’s got pierogi. China’s got baozi. The longer I write, the more I’m craving Korean mandu.

Now, a dude called Klenk who is a… Maultaschenblogger… I don’t know, man. Anyway, this guy passionately defends the Maultasche as a German, more precisely a Swabian, invention. He says that it is incomprehensible that Swabians could have copied the idea of a Maultasche off of “something as simple as tortellini.” Not my words. I promise, Italians, not my words. Klenk further explains that since Swabians have come up with other great things like matches and the literal invention of the automobile, of course only a Swabian could have gotten the idea of using pasta to hide meat from God.

So.

Because, we all know that nobody in China has ever invented anything cool. I don’t know that thinking an omnipotent higher power isn’t gonna notice when you eat meat because you covered it with more food is the sort of genius this guy wants it to be, either.

Well, now you know. Or rather, you don’t. You don’t know when or why people started saying Herrgottsbescheißerle, and you don’t know who first came up with the idea of putting meat in noodles. What you do know is that there is a grown adult somewhere in Germany who is a ravioli blogger. And it’s not even me.

It’s Always Correct to Tip Workers

What a rush. Let’s talk about something relaxing: money!

Specifically, tipping and rounding up. I don’t really go out of my way to make this some sort of actionable educational blog, I assume you guys aren’t looking to learn actual German from me, just some funny words and swears. But, for once, I am teaching you something that might actually come in handy for you if you ever travel into a German-speaking country: Stimmt so.

I find “stimmt so” charming, because it comes with a sense of blind confidence that I am all about. “Keep the change” is a command, a good-natured one, which I also like, and I don’t have a preference between the two. But the vibe is different. Stimmen, in this context, means to be right, to be correct. The verb can also mean tuning and voting. But here, in combination with the German so, you’re just saying, this is correct. Hey? I’ve done the math. I am paying you the correct amount right now.

Yes, yes, naturally, this is also subject to frequent dad jokes. I’m buying something for €20, I slide them €15 and I say, “Stimmt so.” Staff gives me a pained smile until I slide them the remaining €5 and we all try to forget about this situation as quickly as we humanly can.

But generally, correctly, it is used for rounding up, and I enjoy that. Giving someone a big tip for their great work and confidently declaring that actually, this is the correct amount that you should be paying, it feels good. If we’re going to be stuck with the awful concept of money at all, the least we can do is be confidently and staunchly generous with it.

By the way: the German word for a tip is Trinkgeld, meaning drinking money. The French word for it is pourboire, meaning for drinking! So we all, way back, were very clear on what we’re going to be using those tips on. Why are they called tips in English? Well, reader, I’m not about to start explaining English words to you on my German blog, but I heartily invite you to look up tipping on Wiktionary, and gaze upon the approximately three billion origins the word might or might not have. Who knows! It’s your Frankenstein language, and it’s possible that thieves’ cant came up with tipping. Which is so much cooler than some Swabian thief—er, monk—thinking he could prank God.

(Last note: I don't usually source these, because it's always just Wiktionary and Wikipedia. But this time, you can find Mister Klenk's strong tortellini opinions here.)