As an avid skier, the President of the State Parliament raves about the snow. When the Bavarian language root was awarded in Straubing, however, it turned out that even journalists who write for local newspapers no longer know this word.
snow
After Ilse Aigner, President of the Landtag, recently received the “Bairie Sprachroot” dialect prize at the Gäuboden folk festival in Straubing, she was asked by the journalists which words she particularly liked. She had a surprising answer ready, and it was: “a good snow!” How could it be otherwise for a woman who is at home at the foot of the Alps. Good snow is every skier’s dream, snow on which skis slide down into the valley as soft as butter. This dream is sung from the heart in a Pfronten folk song from 1921: “Two boards, a good snow, yay, that’s my highest idea!” And yet linguistic pearls like the enticing snow probably no longer have a great future. This was confirmed by a hard-working young journalist in Straubing, who probably didn’t know the term and reinterpreted it slightly: “a gfriariger Schnä.” The snow is frozen, that’s true, but unfortunately this version wasn’t very fluent in language. In modern journalism, snow is already having a difficult time. Skeptics see an even bigger problem. Climate change, they think, has long since ensured that the snow and with it Ilse Aigner’s favorite word will disappear.
Ratz
“You rat”, this crude swear word can be heard quite often in the detective stories that are shown on television. It really doesn’t sound nice, no wonder that this word has never found its way into the Bavarian language varieties. If only because the double “t” in this case is almost unpronounceable for dialectally shaped Bavarian people. That’s why the rat became the Ratz (plural: Ratzen), which is often used as a powerful metaphor in cabaret, among other things. Years ago, Monika Gruber once remarked that footballer Philipp Lahm was “hung up on his wife like Ratz am Pressack” at an event. Ringing rats were once quite notorious in Regensburg. When bored, anarchically inclined boys liked to catch a Ratz, put it in a net and then hung it on the bell train of a house. They considered this to be good fun. The Ratzinger brothers weren’t fun boys, but they did have nicknames in the Traunstein boys’ seminary. Joseph was the book rat, his brother Georg was called the organ rat because he was practically stuck on the organ bench.