Ships
The verb schiffen has been used in upscale German to mean “to drive by ship” since the 13th century.
“The youth ships into the ocean with a thousand masts;
The old man drifts into the harbor quietly on a rescued boat. "
This original meaning can still be found in " embark ". The word Schiffer for the captain was taken all the more easily from the Dutch schipper and the Low German schipper . Otherwise it is also generally available for boaters, such as river boaters . Transfer airship for a free balloon driver already used Jean Paul .
In the 18th century this previous meaning was suppressed in coarse colloquial language. The student name for the chamber pot comes from Middle High German schif for a (elongated, ship-shaped) container (compare the water boat in old kitchen stoves and the boat in the loom) . From this the word "ship" for urinating was developed .
This polysemy led to involuntarily comical translations in foreign language, especially Latin lessons , or was even deliberately used for word games (see also kitchen Latin ). From this, in turn, the colloquial term “it ships” for “it rains” is used.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Above all according to Kluge, Etymological Dictionary of the German Language , 24th edition, 2002.
- ↑ The Airship Giannozzo Seebuch , Appendix to Titan , 1801.
- ^ Friedrich Kluge , Alfred Götze : Etymological dictionary of the German language . 20th ed., Ed. by Walther Mitzka , De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1967; Reprint (“21st unchanged edition”) ibid 1975, ISBN 3-11-005709-3 , p. 648.