schnickle fritz
English translation: Schnickelfritz - endearment
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| 13:12 Dec 11, 2001 |
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|  Selected response from: Maya Jurt Switzerland Local time: 10:08 | |||
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| 4 +3 | Schnickelfritz - endearment |
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| 4 +1 | A few ideas ... |
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| 5 | no German meaning just a funny term used |
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| 5 | no German meaning just a funny term used |
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| 5 | schnicklfritz |
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| 4 | It's a nonsense word |
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| 1 | scalawag, rascal, or troublemaker |
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| Discussion entries: 1 | |
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Answers
3 mins confidence: 
peer agreement (net): +1
peer agreement (net): +1A few ideas ... Explanation: This was asked quite recently ... if you have a look at the link below, you can see what people came up with then! HTH Mary Reference: http://www.proz.com/kudoz/106776?keyword=schnickel |
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15 mins confidence: peer agreement (net): +3
peer agreement (net): +3Schnickelfritz - endearment Explanation: Here is the whole story, courtesy to Random House: As a child, I remember hearing the term schnickelfritz used as a term of endearment by a parent or grandparent of German heritage toward a young member of the family. With an internet search, I have found a reference where it was suggested that schnickelfritz was used as an endearing term meaning 'little chatterbox' or 'rascal', and was not gender specific. Can you offer more insight regarding the term's meaning and origins? Well, maybe a little. I had to try to tackle this one because my father (German ancestry on his mother's side) called me Schnickelfritz too. It was at some point in its history gender-specific, because -fritz is a combining form that means 'chap' or 'guy'. I'm sure my father meant it as such, because his full nickname for me turned my first and middle names into boys' names, and he used the nickname when I was being tomboyish. I searched in vain in every slang book we've got here, in the OED, in Noah Webster's original dictionary, in the Century Dictionary, several other American dictionaries small and large, and in many German dictionaries. What I came up with was the combining form mentioned above, the noun Schnickschnack, the verb schnicken, and three citations from Dr. Jonathan Lighter's slang files--two for the spelling schnickelfritz and one for schnigglefritz. So, all I can do is speculate, and hope my guess is close. In most of the larger bilingual German-English dictionaries, you'll find the word Schnickschnack, which has a cline of meanings from 'chit-chat' through 'tittle-tattle' to 'twaddle' and 'nonsense'. The monolingual Wahrig Deutsches Wörterbuch says the noun is a doubling of Schnack which also means 'chit-chat' or 'drivel'. The informal verb schnicken means 'to jerk' or 'to seize' and implies fast, sudden, choppy movements. Somewhere in there, I think, the idea of the "schnickel" part referring to chatterboxes or impulsive people is confirmed. The three citations don't shed much light on the origin or meaning, although they do seem to suggest a 19th-century German immigrant origin: "My aunt Julie would call me, 'You little schnickelfritz' [ca.1940]. She was ancient. She was born in Brooklyn about 1875." (1985, NYC woman, age ca. 50) "Mynheer Schnickelfritzer" (from A.P. Hudson's Humor of the Old South, 1864) "Listen, Schniggle-fritz, I can do it in my sleep." (Gresham, Nightmare, 1946) Whoever first used it, the term schnickelfritz seems to have survived as an endearment, although it is probably fading from use. Internet and Lexis searches turn up not much more than a few uses as nicknames, Freddie Fisher's Schnickelfritz Band of the 1930s and '40s, and the fact that Helmut Huber, the Austrian-born husband of Susan Lucci (a.k.a. Erica Kane on All My Children), likes to call her Schnickelfritz. Wendell Raymond Schnickelfritz |
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