Today, we don’t talk about an indigenous, Austrian word. But it is great. So I could not resist. We are talking about the Deppenzepter . If you Google the word , you may not find that many hits, yet. Let’s do the normal thing and dissect the word. It consists of the German Depp which could be translated as idiot, fool or joker. As well as the work Zepter which is scepter, sign for the king. Or better the Joker, as in this playing card: To get an idea about the meaning of the word, think about the last time you were somewhere nice and you nearly got beaten by a person with a stick. Never happened to you? That’s just because the person did it unintentionally. And the stick was sophisticated with a phone on the other end! Does it start to make sense? As an image tells more than a thousand words, let’s place a great phone from a guy with a Deppenzepter here: Thanks Heise Foto for the great article! Homework: Please have a healthy laugh about people making selfies, espec
This should be a humorous guide for people learning or trying to understand the German spoken in Austria. And there are lots of problems, like Austrians make everything small in their language. And with some words they got so used to the small form, that they don’t even have a normal form for it anymore, like Eutzerl, there is no such thing as a Eutz.