Schaufel Schaufel Schippe Schippe

[muckefuck]

Don't know if you caught the story last week about small-time hood Lutz Bachmann (which continues to look to me like the kind of lazy rearrangement of "Baz Luhrmann" you'd find in an amateurish Hollywood roman-à-clef) being forced to step down from the leadership of Pegida, the anti-immigrant movement he founded, after posting a picture of himself with a Hitler moustache and comb-over. In his defence, he said, "Man muss sich auch mal selbst auf die Schippe nehmen" and I hadn't the slightest idea what he meant. At first, I thought I was dealing with a Saxon dialect expression. With its double p, Schippe screams "mitteldeutsch" to me. And it is, but nonetheless it's a regionalism that's made its way into the standard. Still, being able to translate the sentence as "You've got to take yourself onto the shovel" didn't clarify things for me until I found that the equivalent idiom is "make fun of yourself".

What was particularly interesting to me was to find that the idiom has travelled further than the word itself. The maps from the Atlas der Alltagssprache show that, although "Schippe" is restricted to the Saarland, Rheinland-Pflaz, and the former East (the usual word is Schaufel), in that expression, "Schippe" is nigh-universal outside of Austria. (There are a few spots where the expression isn't current at all, however, and it turns out that some are scattered right near where I lived in Germany. So I'm going to claim that I come by my ignorance honestly.) Makes me wonder how many Germans use it without knowing what a "Schippe" refers to or having made up some idiosyncratic definition of their own (which I was in the process of doing before I did my research).