kneeling
Prime Minister Markus Söder said in an interview with the magazine The mirror demonstrated linguistic creative qualities. If he had answered all questions honestly up to that point, his patience was finally strained when the question of a possible candidate for chancellor came up. “But you’re knee-deep again today,” he replied to the journalists, grinning as was to be read in brackets. The word kniefiesig is hard to find in dictionaries. One of the journalists who conducted the interview later announced on Twitter that Söder quickly got going “and we learned a new Franconian word, knee-jerk.” A native of Franconia immediately countered online: “Kniefiesig is definitely not a Franconian word, it doesn’t even sound Franconian.” It’s sporadic in online chats, but you have to figure out the meaning of knee-jerk. At one point it says about a perfectionist: “He works carefully and conscientiously. But he is also mean-spirited, he finds the smallest mistake and is absolutely punctual.” So you could sum it up like this: Anyone who is knee-jerk is petty, pedantic, a kind of dot shit (Dipflscheißer), as they say in Bavaria.
spotted shit
The old Munich soul sticks to words like Tüpferlscheißer, this fabulous mixture of grant, laissez-faire and wisdom that unfortunately gets lost in modern jargon with its sprawling cheap vocabulary. Of course, you don’t want to be a linguistic idiot who complains about every wrong comma with a raised index finger. A dotty shit is generally understood to be a person who is often petty, the words pedant and know-it-all are suitable as synonyms. In the north, they call those types of currants. Former Minister of State Gustl Lang (1929-2004), who came from the Upper Palatinate, once said: “As a minister, I was never a doddy shit.”