Scott? Scott?

I was chatting with Beth this afternoon about my lightning visit to Austria, and our conversation reminded me of my respectful-but-oh-so-rusty efforts to communicate in German to the inhabitants of Linz. At first, I was perplexed by their habit of addressing me as “Scott” — till I remembered that this was “ ’S Gott,” short for “Grüß Gott,” which in turn is short for “Es grüß dich Gott”: roughly, “God bless you.”
 
Mostly, though, I just like using the eszet key. I ♡ Unicode.

1 thought on “Scott? Scott?

  1. Grüß Gott works well in southern Germany, as you probably know. It’s the standard greeting my first high-school German teacher taught, as she was from that part of Germany. So when I used that greeting on meeting some people in Frankfurt, they laughed heartily. I suppose it would be like a teenage German arriving in Chicago and greeting people with, “Howdy! How are y’all?” 🙂 Or something.

    Too late, I remembered that Guten Tag was pretty much standard farther north.

    I like ess-zett as well. Too bad it’s used less frequently now under the new Rechtschreibung (“proper writing,” or orthographic standards). Like “dass” in all those relative clauses.

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