Backfisch (girl)

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Fried fish is a - now obsolete - the name for adolescent girls in adolescence .

etymology

According to Friedrich Kluge , who published a dictionary of the German student language in 1895, the word comes from the student language and has passed into the general vocabulary from there. It is attested as academic as early as the 16th century as a joke translation of “Baccalaureus”, that is, for someone who has attained the lowest academic degree, and also appears in this way in the “Facetiae facetiarum” (1645): “Baccalaurei… et infimum tenent gradum, vulgo Backfisch, Larissen, Plateisen, Speckerbes, Stautzenfresser. «In student circles the word was probably later applied to girls. The same etymology of the baccalaureus should also come from the fact that one is “freshly baked” when completing an apprenticeship or a degree.

There are other common explanations for the name of the fried fish: it is a "not yet fully grown" fish, which is transferred to young girls as a name, similar to the word "fresh fish". The word component Back is interpreted differently.

  • It denotes young fish that are not suitable for cooking or frying. These were then baked, for example in a batter.
  • The word came from the English fishermen jargon where with back fish a fish signified, which is not yet large enough to be eaten, and therefore back (into the water back ) should be cast. However, English dictionaries only know the word as a derivation from the German for young girls, not in the meaning of bycatch.
  • The word comes from the nautical language. After hauling in the nets, fish that were too small were thrown back into the sea via the bow or port .

Hermann Schrader (1815–1902) discussed all these explanatory models in his work “ Bilderschmuck der Deutschen Sprache ” as well as a twisted bac h fish that is so small that it still swims in spring waters. Schrader rejected this first interpretation as well as the interpretations of the thrown back fish (English back or seafaring back ) as tasteless and unnatural and declared the interpretation of the baked fish to be the supposedly correct one, using the phrase “not meat, not fish”. The interpretation from the sailor's language was picked up again and spread in 2001 by Wolfgang Werner Sauer and Walter Krämer, who published a lexicon of linguistic errors. Here, too, the thesis from the English-speaking area was rejected, since the expression arose at a time when English was less widespread than it is today.

History of use

"Backfisch" was already common in the 18th century. a. with Goethe:

“Götz: The smartest thing was that you ended your quarrel so happily and happily by getting married.
Father of the bride: Better than I could have dreamed. In peace and quiet with my neighbor, and a daughter well looked after!
Bridegroom: And I have the disputed piece, and over it the pretty fried fish in the whole village. "

- Götz von Berlichingen with the iron hand, second act, peasant wedding

The Worms Backfischfest was introduced in Worms in 1933 , in which fish are in the foreground, but are deliberately played with the ambiguity of the name.

In the 1950s, who were flappers the yobs over who wanted to provoke in the adult world. Only a few girls were hooligans, the girls' world was more of a "culture of four walls" that was found in the living rooms of the young people, and dealt with fashion, music ( Schlager , increasingly Americanized) and magazines like Bravo .

Analogous to this, girls' books used to be called " Backfischromane ", for example The Defiant Head . In such novels, the so-called backfish years , i.e. the female development years, are described.

The beginning of the Backfisch age is determined quite precisely by proverbs. A common variant was taken up by Else Ury when she wrote the Backfischroman "fourteen years and seven weeks" . (As a phrase to this: “At fourteen years and seven weeks, the backfish crept out.”) Other sources speak of “thirteen years and two weeks” .

By the end of the 20th century, the designation of young girls as "backfish" largely disappeared from everyday language.

literature

  • David Ehrenpreis: The Figure of the Backfisch: Representing Puberty in Wilhelmine Germany. In: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Volume 67, Issue 4, 2004, pp. 479–508.

Web links

Wiktionary: Backfisch  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedrich Kluge: Etymological dictionary of the German language , 22nd edition. Edited by Elmar Seebold . De Gruyter, Berlin / New York, 1989. ISBN 978-3-11-084503-7 . P. 54.
  2. ^ Friedrich Kluge: German student language . Trübner, Strasbourg 1895, p. 19
  3. ↑ Bildlexikon der Erotik, Institute for Sexual Research, Vienna 1928–1932, Vol. 1, page 92
  4. ↑ a b c d Sigi Kube: How does the cat get in the poke and what does the cuckoo know about it ?: Animal idioms and their meanings . Heyne, 2011, ISBN 9783641053611 . Digitized
  5. ↑ a b c Origin of the word according to Spiegel Online, article on June 11, 2007 , accessed on September 19, 2015
  6. ^ A b Robert Sedlaczek, Sigmar Grüner: Lexicon of language errors Austria , 2003, Deuticke Verlag
  7. ↑ Keyword in Duden (online edition)
  8. ↑ a b Michael Miersch: Everything used to be better . 2010. Digitized
  9. ↑ Origin of the word according to Wissen.de
  10. ↑ Hein Timm: ... not so stiff at all . Kabel Verlag, 1980
  11. ^ Hermann Schrader: The picture decoration of the German language in thousands of popular sayings . Published around 1886, reprint 2005 of the 7th edition 1912 by Georg Olms Verlag, 2005, with a foreword by Wolfgang Mieder, p. 475 ( digitized version )
  12. ↑ Walter Krämer, Wolfgang Sauer: Lexicon of popular language errors , Frankfurt am Main, 2001, p. 12