Wackes

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Wackes is a colloquial term that used to be more common in northwestern Switzerland , Baden and the Palatinate and was mostly used derogatoryly for the inhabitants of Alsace ( French departments of Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin ). In Saarland , the expression for the German Lorraine is common.

The same word, just spelled differently, is Waggis , a Basel carnival figure .

meaning

In the above and central German -speaking common meanings "dissolute man, Surly, Rüppel, no-good, good-for-nothing, drifter, lout, vagabond" are regional "small or fat child, (stocky) strong guy, clumsy man, railway workers, also Saar schiffer" . The specific meaning “Alsatian” or “Lorraine” has a clearly pejorative character.

Written language evidence began in 1870 with the war reports on the Franco-German War . In a document from 1870, "the Wackes" is equated with the Strasbourg mob . The word seems to have spread through the language of the soldiers.

At the end of 1913, the Zabern affair came about in connection with the derogatory use of the word by a Prussian officer stationed in Alsace . The constitutional lawyer and publicist Gerhard Anschütz , who commented critically on the Zabern events as a contemporary, explained to his readers that “Wackes” was “said from the old German to the Alsatian, about as much as the 'Saupreuss' in the mouth of the southern German”.

Nowadays, the term Wackes is usually hardly taken as a serious insult to the Alsatians and Lorraine people, but is used as "teasing to disparaging" depending on the situation.

Word origin

There are different details about the origin of the printout. In the Palatinate, Lorraine and Alsatian dictionary the word is placed in Latin vagus (country driver). In 1933, Nicolas Freistroffer from Lorraine reported that in his home country people tried to explain German 'Sauwackes' with French sauvages 'Wilde'. The most likely explanation was postulated for the first time in 1902 by the folklorist Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer from Basel , and it was further elaborated in 1963/4 by the Freiburg German scholar Otmar Werner . According to this, Wackes, Waggis, the extinct written German, but dialectally still lively wagge (n), wacke (n) "move back and forth, wobble, sway", is the basis. A Waggis, Wackes is therefore originally someone who "wags", that is, moves about, loafs or wobbles.

literature

  • Ernest Altenbach: Wacky. E satyrical definition of the word 'Wackes'. Poem in six Vaersle uf Milhueser-Ditsch. Mulhouse 1918.
  • Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer : Suffix -is, -s in Swiss dialects. In: Zeitschrift für Hochdeutsche Mundarten 3, 1902, pp. 26–46.
  • Christoph Landolt : Waggis. Word history from March 30, 2015, ed. from the editors of the Swiss Idiotikon .
  • Franz August Stocker : On the etymology of the word 'Waggis'. In: Vom Jura zum Schwarzwald, Volume 6, 1889, pp. 75–76.
  • Otmar Werner : The noun suffixes -es / -as in the East Franconian dialects. On the importance of the dia- and synchronic approach in word formation theory. In: Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 30, 1963/64, pp. 227–275, here p. 266.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The word was first documented in writing according to the Basel German dictionary by Rudolf Suter (Basel 1984) in 1870.
  2. ↑ a b Christoph Landolt: Waggis. Word history from March 30, 2015, ed. from the editors of the Swiss Idiotikon .
  3. ^ Revue d'Alsace, Volume 36, Strasbourg 1885, p. 561
  4. ↑ Erwin Schenk: The Zabern case. In: Contributions to the history of the post-Bismarckian period and the world war. Edited by Fritz Kern. Stuttgart 1927, p. 8.
  5. ↑ Alexis Held: The participation of the Bavarian army in the national war against France in 1870. Munich 1870, p. 306
  6. ^ Gerhard Anschütz: Zabern. In: Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, year 18 (1913), 1457.
  7. ↑ a b Palatine dictionary : Wackes ; Dictionary of German-Lorraine dialects : Wackes ; Dictionary of Alsatian dialects : Wackes ; Swiss Idiotikon : Waggis .
  8. ^ Nicolas Freistroffer: Front reports of a Lorraine, 1914-18. Metz 1933, p. 191. Quoted from Matti Münch: Verdun: Mythos and everyday life of a battle , dissertation, Munich 2006, p. 206, ISBN 3-89975-578-2 .