The Scheiße Brothers

Believe it or not, Saturday Morning Cartoons were a thing in 1990s Germany, too.

And believe it or not, when I was five years old in 1996, I had a huge crush on Robin in Batman: The Animated Series.

So there’s two inflammatorily worded sentences that probably did not surprise anybody at all.

I don’t actually remember how early it really was when TAS was on TV on Saturday mornings. All I know is that it was early enough that my parents usually weren’t up yet. Back when I was five, I was still an ill-advisedly small amount of years away from having my own TV in my room, so my older brother and I had to watch cartoons on the big tube TV in the living room. Of course, when you’re five and seven years old, you can’t just go and use the family TV like some sort of anarchist. You have to ask your parents first.

Also, back when I was five, I was a girl. I personally was not aware of the impact that particular detail would have on my future just yet, but my big brother already knew to work it to our advantage. If you have a little sister, and you have to ask your parents for something, chances are you should have her ask them instead. YMMQOV*.

I’m telling you this because I’d like to introduce you to Scheiße’s friendly and lovable little sibling today.

You remember Scheiße, yes? I generally assume people know what it means, just sort of through cultural osmosis. But to be safe: Scheiße means shit—the noun if capitalized, the adjective if not. German has a lot of fun with it as a word, we use it as a prefix, as a suffix, we build sayings around it. Sayings such as: Nett ist der kleine Bruder/die kleine Schwester von Scheiße. Literally: Nice is shit’s little brother/sister.

I personally have only ever heard that first version of the saying, where nice is shit’s brother. When I looked it up prior to writing this, I found a lot of people using the second version, where she’s shit’s sister. So, first of all, diversity win! This adjective is bigender.

(If you’re actually learning German and starting to worry about grammatical genders: Sorry, don’t worry. As an adjective, Nett doesn’t have a grammatical gender.)

Now, why have Germans decided that these two words are in some way related to each other? Is it etymology? Some sort of linguistic history that connects the two? Wouldn’t that be crazy? No, it’s just that describing something as “nett” makes you sound like you actually thought it was shit.

I’m not entirely sure how well this translates into English. I know that “nice”, as a compliment, isn’t terribly strong. Much like in German, if you use it to describe someone’s personality, that’s perfectly fine, and has no negative connotations. A person can be called “nett” no problem. But if I’m really excited about my new haircut and someone else tells me that it looks “nice”, I personally might feel a little underwhelmed by that response.

Hence, being a country of pessimists (though I very staunchly am not one of those), we’ve decided that anyone who calls something nice must actually mean that it sucks, and is only—or at least—trying to be polite about it. And that is why Nett is Scheiße’s little sibling: Picture Scheiße standing in the hallway knowing that no one is going to like if they comment on someone’s haircut, so they carefully push their little sibling through the door to do it instead.

The only thing I am still left to wonder is what the rest of that family looks like. Personally, I’m a middle child (and I will be taking donations as acknowledgment of my suffering, thank you), and I very much can picture an oft-forgotten but surprisingly punchy sibling between Nett and Scheiße: Okay.

*Your Mileage May Quite Obviously Vary.