I've Had a Bad Week and I'm Going to Swear Now

Alright. I’ve had a shitty week. “Sit on my couch eating Nutella by the spoonful” type shit. I’m fine, before anyone starts worrying. Nobody’s dying, and I’ll get over it. It’s just that everything is difficult all of the time, and shit sucks.

What helps, in times like these?

Easy.

Swearing. Swearing helps.

I had three different German words prepared for this installment of Weird German, but I’ve changed my mind. Come. Take my hand. Fuck all of this. We’re going to talk about shit.

• We will start with the way to avoid saying shit, which is a made up word that makes no sense
• We will look at Schleimscheißer and Klugscheißer, two insults that have you shit some very specific things
• And we will look at every other use of the word Scheiße I could think of.

Scheibenkleister: the euphemism that doesn’t exist

In my life, I have learned that there are people, in this world, who try not to swear. This is incomprehensible to me, always has been, and always will be, but you know me. I’m peaceful, I think language is fun either way, and if you don’t want to swear, I’m not going to get on your case about it. Although “guy who attacks people for not swearing” is admittedly a pretty hilarious persona.

Anyway, you know how people say fudge instead of fuck? Darn instead of damn? Dang, frick, et cetera. This exists in many languages! We are all trying to protect the children, but sometimes we’re half a word in already and have to come up with something different to say.

The German version of this is Scheibenkleister.

And I have no fucking idea why.

I’ve been trying to find out. I really have! I’m sure I could have dug deeper, there has to be an answer somewhere, but my searches at least came up empty. Fudge, at least, is also a word. Scheibenkleister is... Well.

Scheibenkleister is a word in the sense that things can be words in German when you just slap a bunch of nouns together, call that a compound word, and pretend like it makes sense. It’s comprised of Scheibe, which can mean slice as in slice of bread, or pane as in windowpane, and of Kleister, which is this pasty liquidy sort of glue you use for paper mâché and stuff like that.

So they’re both words. And you can slap them together and make a new word, because that’s how German works.

But I don’t know what Scheibenkleister is.

All English translations you’ll find of it only use it in the way I’m introducing it here: as a euphemism for Scheiße. But it must have been a word before that, right? I thought so. But I guess not. There is nothing in this world that is Scheibenkleister. I thought maybe it’s a specific sort of glue you would use to put up posters on windowpanes, like storefronts? You know?? But apparently not? All I ever find when I try to look up Scheibenkleister is Scheiße. It’s all Scheiße. There is no Scheibenkleister that isn’t Scheiße.

Anyway.

I’m fine.

If you want to swear without swearing, you can say Scheibenkleister. Rarely, I also hear people only going for Scheibe, which makes me laugh, because it sounds like they saw people who don’t have a ß key spell it ScheiBe and just ran with it.

Here are some gross things you can poop out

Schleimscheißer and Klugscheißer are insults. I am straight up just teaching you insults now. Hey, if you want, we can pretend that I am teaching you these so you know what’s going on if someone calls you one of them. That works, right? Let’s fucking go.

So we love to call people various versions of shitters. Schleim is a noun and means slime, klug is an adjective and means smart. This also immediately explains what either of these mean.

Schleimscheißer is very fun to say, in my opinion. If you were just trying to talk about a sort of kiss-ass person, you could just call them a Schleimer. That’s someone who sucks up to people, because I guess we associate that with being slimy. Makes sense, if I’m honest. So Schleimer would be enough to convey that.

But of course, Schleimscheißer is much more fun. I don’t want to call you a slimer, I want to call you someone who shoots slime out their asshole. Or, sorry. If, uh, someone says Schleimscheißer to you, then they want to call you a slime shitter. So, you know, look out for that. There you go.

A Klugscheißer is a smartass. Both languages had a similar idea here once again. Not only is your ass smart, it is so smart that it is just shitting the smart out whenever you open your mouth. That’s what someone would say who is calling you a Klugscheißer. Again, just be on the lookout.

I like Klugscheißer because we have also turned it into a verb. That doesn’t happen very often in German, at least not as often as it does in English. In English, you can just about turn anything into a verb. You have a mouth? You’re mouthing now. German can invent a thousand compound nouns per second, but we don’t do verbs as easily.

However, klugscheißen and klugscheißern both exist. The difference, if you can’t see right away, is one R toward the end of the word. Technically, the correct term should be klugscheißen, without the R, because to shit means scheißen, also without the R.

And you can say both. I mean, nobody’s going to give a shit if you’re being grammatically correct with your swears. The people who do care deserve more swears, easy as that.

But there’s a minute difference in connotations, I think. Both absolutely mean the same thing, but klugscheißen is a more literal approach, where you really are shitting smart (not smartly. Shitting smart), whereas klugscheißern seems to be based on the noun Klugscheißer, with the R at the end, so you are behaving like a Klugscheißer.

I’m not going to lie, it is a joyful word to me. It’s fun to say, and I shamelessly use it on myself often enough. Everything I do here, every new post, is me being a Klugscheißer.

Variations. Just, so many

When I say I love saying Scheiße, I really do mean that. I love her. She’s my best friend. She’s versatile. She’s got the range. She’s there for me. And, yes, in case you were wondering, Scheiße in German is indeed a feminine noun. And she is my wife.

I ended up thinking of so many ways to use Scheiße that I decided to go back to old ways here and just give you a list:

• scheiße – when not capitalized, this stops being a noun and instead becomes an adjective. Something can just be scheiße. It can also be an adverb. You have done this in a scheiße way. It’s not quite the same as “shitty” – we have a word for that, I’m about to tell you. Scheiße as an adjective or adverb just has that special touch to it. That touch of nothing. No, you didn’t do it shittily. You just did it shit.
• beschissen – Here. This is essentially our word for shitty. Speaking literally, I would say this means more that something was shat upon.
• verscheißen – ver- is another great prefix, like be-. Verscheißen means that you’re fucking up. It’s used with a neutral object most of the time, and it’s reflexive. When you’ve fucked up with someone, in German, you have essentially shat upon yourself with them: es sich mit jemandem verscheißen.
• verscheißern – There’s that pesky R again. Verscheißen, without the R, also often gets used like this, although I personally prefer to keep the two separate. Verscheißern means that you’re fucking with someone. Playing a little prank. A little fib. Shittering on them. You know how it is.
• in der Scheiße sitzen/stecken – You are not doing very well when you are sitting or stuck in the shit. It’s often paired with “bis zum Hals,” meaning you’re up to your neck in shit. Just wanted to have that imagery represented here.
• Scheiß- – Surprise! Scheiße alone can also be a prefix. Drop the e at the end, and you can practically tack it onto whatever. Most used might be scheißegal, egal meaning that something doesn’t matter, so you’re really driving home how little you care. You really can slap it on whatever else you want, though. Just go wild. Scheiß drauf!
• Scheiß drauf – This is essentially our “Fuck it.” And I do love fuck it. But I love scheiß drauf just as much. While the English fuck it kind of implies copulating with something you’ve decided to stop giving a damn about, us Germans just shit on it. That’s what scheiß drauf means. Who cares, man. Scheißegal. Shit on it.
• Scheiße glänzt nicht, wenn man sie poliert. – This is a wonderful saying. It means shit doesn’t glimmer when you polish it. Meaning that you can pretty something up as much as you like, if it started out as shit, then it’s still shit, my guy. I was thinking about this a lot last year when my former boss attempted to offer me a fifty cent raise for a job I’d already quit.
• Scheiße fließt von oben nach unten. – Another saying, meaning shit flows from the top down. You know? You know. Trickle down and all. That fifty cent raise thing still applies here I think.
• der Scheiß – As I’ve said, Scheiße is a feminine noun. There is also der Scheiß, though. You take the e away and suddenly it’s masculine. This is explicitly a swear now. You could make an argument that die Scheiße is just a vulgar way of describing feces. Der Scheiß has nothing to do with feces anymore. This is a concept now. Der Scheiß isn’t feces, der Scheiß is shit as an idea, as an abstract, der Scheiß is but the feeling you get in your body when you think of anything that’s slimy and stinks.

How’re we doing, everyone? Wasn’t that nice? Was that not a good image to send you off with?

In all honesty? As I’m writing this, right now, it is seven minutes to midnight on Sunday. My Scheißwoche (shit week) is almost over. I have spent almost all of today writing about one of my favorite swears.

Kein Scheiß – no shit, as in, I’m not fucking with you right now, I’m not shitting you on this – kein Scheiß, I feel much better now.