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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • So this meme would only make sense in Old High German.

    Maybe I put it wrong, but it works even better in modern Germany: “Stuhl” means chair in modern German. The joke/pun is well-known in German: “Darf ich Ihnen den Stuhl zurückschieben?” So unlike in the English version, “Stuhl” literally both means “chair” and “poop”.



  • Great to see a fellow frog in the wild!


    I am guessing this comes directly from German

    The German and English wikipedia have interesting information about the etymology of the English chair and the German Stuhl:

    Chair:

    Chair comes from the early 13th-century English word chaere, from Old French chaiere (“chair, seat, throne”), from Latin cathedra (“seat”).

    Stuhl:

    […] althochdeutsch stuol ‚Sitz, Thron‘ […]

    (Old high German stuol meaning ‘seat’ or ‘throne’

    Das Wort Stuhl […] ist mit l-Suffix zur indoeuropäischen Wurzel *stā-, *stǝ- ‚stehen, stellen‘ gebildet.

    (The word Stuhl is built from the proto-indo-european language by adding the suffix ‘l’ to the root ‘*stā’ or ‘*stǝ’ which means ‘to stand’)

    So both means seat/seating or throne but chair is more a throne-like furniture (by having arm rests and/or back rest) whereas Stuhl was more like a simple stool (a small foot rest or seating without any back rest or arm rests). In German we use “Schemel” or “Hocker” to describe such a stool. “Schemel” seems to come from “scamilla”, Latin for small bench.

    I have no idea how all this information helps us, but it’s interesting :D