The Guardian story I’m posting (by Kate Connolly) is adequately represented by its headline: Doorbell prankster that tormented residents of German apartments turns out to be a slug. Here are the paragraphs of Hattic interest:
At first they had suspected the so-called klingelstreich (bell prank), a sometimes popular pastime among German youths. Ding dong ditch, knock-a-door run, or knock-down-ginger as it is variously referred to in English, it typically involves children or youths ringing on a doorbell then running away before they are caught.
But when the ringing continued even after the arrival of two police officers, despite the fact that no one was at the door and a motion detector had failed to activate, a closer look at the metal bell plate revealed the presence of the slug, or nacktschnecke in German – literally a “naked snail”.
If it were any other paper, I’d complain about the lack of capitals on the German nouns, but hey, it’s the Graun, and I’m just glad to learn about ding dong ditch, knock-a-door run, and knock-down-ginger — I don’t remember knowing any special terms for this obnoxious practice. Thanks, Trevor!
This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock_down_ginger gives a variety of synonyms with geographical ranges attached, and says that “knock knock ginger” is English or maybe specifically Southern -England. If someone is trying to do isoglosses within the US, I grew up in “ding dong ditch” country, as best as I can recall.
That wiki piece also links to this fascinating Grauniad story from 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/16/pakistan-recalls-envoy-from-india-harassment-claims-doorbell-ringing
“Knock down ginger” is the term I know. But I was not given to the practice in my early years in Scotland. (Any assertions to the contrary are transparent smears by my political enemies.)
When I do it nowadays, I call it “canvassing.”
You can add Ring and Run. And I do like the idea that the snail is normative and the slug is a naked snail. I think it’s true developmentally too, with some slugs carrying a vestigial shell.
Having moved a few times in my childhood, I’ve known it under some three or four names. The ones I remember now are ring-på-og-stikk-a “ring-and-run” and ringepiggen < pigge av “run away (slang)”.
Norw. nakensnegl “slug”. You all expected that.
I am a little surprised that you have not encountered “ding dong ditch” before, since it features regularly in the US news media, when grown-ass men shoot the child pranksters.
Kusaal wilisʋŋ can be either: slug or snail. Wɩɩlʋf in the Toende dialect. The Nawdm cognate welŋu can be either, too.
The root *wɪl- can be reconstructed to proto-Oti-Volta, but every individual language that has it seems to add a different derivational suffix and/or incorporate it into a different compound. Not a good one for the Swadesh lists …
Both terrestrial and marine slugs are indeed highly polyphyletic. And check out semi-slugs…
Dunno though: Kassem kunkwəri “snail”, where the root is kwər-, with a commonly attested kind of initial reduplication, could be cognate with proto-Bantu *-kódá, I think. (Can’t find any words for “snail” in other Grusi languages.) But given the variety of words in “Gur”, this could just be cherrypicking. Any random etymon at all can be given a plausible-looking lookalike in some Gur language …
… youths ringing on a doorbell then running away before they are caught.
…to distinguish them from those running away after they are caught.
In apartment buildings with a common intercom, one may also press all the buttons and hear one or two dozen people saying “hello?” “hello?” to each other.
Not that I would know anything about it, of course. Like everyone else here, I am and always have been a perfect angel.
Welsh has malwod “snail”, gwlithen “slug”, but malwod can actually include slugs; oddly (now I think of it) “slug” as in “bullet” is malwod too.
It hadn’t actually occurred to me that English “slug” as “bullet” might be connected with the mollusc. Wiktionary seems to think so:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slug
I wonder if the Welsh malwod in that sense is a calque?
running away before [vs after] they are caught.
I rather think the point is the running. Like what snails (naked or otherwise) don’t.
How long did it take for the Polizei to turn up? And didn’t it first occur to the residents to look at the doorbell that continued to ring?
Or do you not go to the front door at night in Bavaria?
… somewhere in the distance a doorbell rang …
Wiktionary seems to think the “bullet” sense is an older one than the “gastropod” sense by a century or so. Which raises for me the question of what the latter sort of slug would have been called in English before it was called a slug …
5 min is not uncommon.
Or maybe nobody wrote about those in the “gastropod” sense until the era of mass literacy?
what the latter sort of slug would have been called in English before it was called a slug …
I have just tried the “Historical Thesaurus” feature of the OED for the first time. It gives
The first citation for plain “slug” in this sense is from 1703, with a question mark, since it may not refer to the same animal.
Oh! That certainly looks like the shape sense is older.
In Cork we called it “runaway knock”, which would be admirably transparent except that by then it was being perpetrated via the doorbell.
running away before [vs after] they are caught — OED1 sv before C. Conj. or conjunctive adv. distinguishes sense 1 “Of time: Previous to the time when” from sense 2 “Of preference: Sooner than, rather than”. I suggest the sense here is C2 rather than C1; OED3 may have added better options.
The first citation for plain “slug” in this sense is from 1703, with a question mark, since it may not refer to the same animal.
No, since the date is uncertain. I don’t know what I was thinking.
On the streets of Chicago in the 70’s a round metal piece, like one knocked out of the back of an electrical box to pass wire through the resulting hole, was called a slug. For me, the key thing about a slug was that it was about the size of a quarter but wasn’t one. Somewhat like a slug to a snail.
But I’m not sure that sense figured into the actual meaning or derivation. It was just the most important factor for a six-year old who liked to buy baseball cards and pop, which at that point could be purchased as a two-for with a quarter.
I see now that that may be an extension of the bullet meaning, perhaps via bullets that flattened on impact.
In typesetting, using a handheld composing stick, a line of type is called a slug.
A much more common typesetting use of slug is a six point (72 points to the inch) spacing bar used between paragraphs or even lines in odd cases.
I have no idea what, if any, relationship this may have to slimy critters or bullets, other than the material used for the latter. Typesetting slugs are made of lead.
The oldest sense of slug in the OED is not a gastropod but a person, “A slow, lazy fellow; a sluggard”, attested from the 1400s. Probably of Scandinavian origin. In the next centuries it’s used for a slow sailing vessel, then any kind of slow animal or vehicle, before finally developing the more specific gastropod sense.
The various “piece of metal” senses are treated by OED and AHD in a separate entry, maybe originating somehow from the older slug; “bullet” is the oldest of these, dating from the early 1600s.
Before English started applying the word slug to unshelled gastropods, they just weren’t distinguished from snails, according to the OED at snail, sense 1a: “One or other of the terrestrial or freshwater gasteropods having a well-developed spiral or whorled shell capable of housing the whole body; also formerly (and still dialect and Scottish) a slug.” The Historical Thesaurus unfortunately doesn’t have this linked to slug; probably it should be.
According to AJP, “Norwegian calls both slugs and snails ‘snegler’ which saves words but can occasionally be a tiny bit confusing.” (Scandi-Congo!)
The Guardian probably supports gemäßigte kleinschreibung.
For slak (slug, snail)
M. Philippa, F. Debrabandere, A. Quak, T. Schoonheim en N. van der Sijs (2003-2009) Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands, Amsterdam
has
De huidige vorm met -a- is wrsch. ontstaan onder volksetymologische invloed van het bn. slac ‘slap, traag’, zie → slaken.
Mnl. slecke heeft geen equivalenten in de andere Germaanse talen, maar is wrsch. toch wel een erfwoord, ontwikkeld uit pgm. *slikkō- pgm. *-kk- volgens de wet van Kluge en met de stamklinker van de nominatief. Dit is een afleiding bij de wortel van → slijk. De slak is dus genoemd naar zijn glibberigheid.
i.e., the a in modern slak (“snail, slug”) is probably due to folk etymology with the “weak” word, and Middle Dutch slecke is from a PG *slikkō, with a meaning “slick, slippery”.
source: https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/slak1
The homonym slak means “slag” (byproduct of smelting). Are bullets forged or just smelted and poured into molds?
The Historical Thesaurus suggests that while the word “snail” was originally used to refer to both snails and slugs (as in the other Germanic languages, it would seem), the slug was originally the “default” snail and it was the shelled version that had a special name to distinguish it, namely rensnaegl, where ren- probably derives from ærn (house, dwelling), given that the Historical Thesaurus also gives “house-snail” as a later term for the same.
There is no Old English word listed that specifically means “slug” as opposed to “snail”.
https://ht.ac.uk/category/?type=search&qsearch=snail&word=snail&label=&category=&oef=&oel=&startf=&startl=&endf=&endl=¤tf=¤tl=&year=&twoEdNew=&twoEdUpdated=&page=1#id=30075
My mum talks about snails-with-shells (there were never snails with shells around when she was wee, she says), which does suggest the possibility of snails without shells. As far as I’m aware she always calls slugs slugs, though.
I knew “knock-knock ditch” and it’s like a 98% that I heard it in a TV show or movie.
And I must share the Hebrew word for slug, one of the most poetic neologisms I know (not sure when it’s from, it’s not in my 1963 Even Shoshan and the Academy website cites the 2003 mollusk dictionary which is definitely too late). It’s probably inspired by the German and other semantic friends, and it’s חֲשׂוּפִית /xasufit/, from “exposed” but in a… slightly suggestive manner?
Well, I’m just glad that–per the article–the slug wasn’t hurt.
Yes, I expect it was let go with a warning.
Grove snails occur north all the way to “central Scotland”, says the German WP article; that may well be climate change in action.
And in an office environment, one might, after normal office hours, 1-second-call a bunch of random people from a co-worker’s phone so the co-worker gets a series of unexpected return calls next day, to mutual confusion. Or so I’ve heard. Telefonstreich.
Yuval: Looking at Google Books and the National Library’s Historical Newspaper Database, חשופית seems to date to the early 1980s. 1981 is the earliest I could find.
After reading Ryan’s comment my brain dredged up a line from the novelty song “Nuttin’ for Christmas” that goes “bought some gum with a penny slug”.
the references to this Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug_(coin)
remind me that I need to try using 10-baht coins as 2 euros the next time I’m in Europe, if they didn’t somehow fix this problem decades ago:
https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/euro-bargeld-thai-muenzen-ueberlisten-automaten-a-169714.html
GeoX:
languagehat:
The article ends with: a police spokesperson in Schwabach, Bavaria, said the animal had “been brought down to size, taught about its territory boundaries and placed on a nearby stretch of grass”.
I wondered how that was phrased in the original German; searching for [ nacktschnecke klingelstreich ] brings up German-language articles about the incident, such as here (spiegel.de), and the statement by the police was actually: »Nachdem die Nacktschnecke durch die Polizeibeamten zur Schnecke gemacht, über die Reviergrenzen belehrt und auf eine angrenzende Wiese verbracht wurde, konnten die Anwohner ihre Nachtruhe endlich fortsetzen.«
Perhaps people actually natively fluent in Deutsch can explain if there is some particular wordplay or other humor in that sentence. I get the impression that “made into a snail” is an idiom for (as translated) “brought down to size” (deflated; had their swollen ego punctured). And maybe also a hint of trying to humourously imply that the naked-snail was given clothes (so it wouldn’t be running around naked)?
Wiktionary:
—
umgangssprachlich: jemandem (öffentlich) so heftige Vorwürfe machen, dass er ganz eingeschüchtert ist
—
So in addition to deflate, the idea is deflate by “pinning the ears back” with a denunciatory, scolding speech. I suppose the humour is, as well as the wordplay, the idea of a big policeperson, packing serious firepower, wagging his finger at and telling off a tiny and defenceless slug who can’t understand what the policeperson is saying anyway. But I am not L1.
Indeed, it seems inappropriate to rebuke a slug for perfectly natural slug behaviour. I have to say that this seems to be a microaggression, suggestive of a systemic sluggism.
I presume a German slug understands German with all its nuances, even if it can’t speak it.
@PP: Yep, you understood correctly. @Owlmmirror: I’d say the idea of transforming the slug into a snail by clothing it is overthinking it. The humor is rather in “turning something into X that already is X”. An approximate English equivalent would perhaps be using “was brought down to size” with the target being a dwarf.
‘Brought down to size’ is quite funny about a slug in English – it couldn’t be much smaller, or any more down.
Zur Schnecke gemacht is what you are once Drill Sergeant Nasty is done with you, unless you’re already a gastropod in the first place.