... No Shit! | Sprachlog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I found this particularly interesting: "Dundes claims that German farmers (but not farmers in other cultures) used to keep a manure pile in the back yard, to be used as fertilizer (p. 12ff.)."
Professor Dundes apparently knew little of gardening. I have a com poster in my own backyard. I'm not German, and I live in the city. I always thought this canard had something to do with Martin Luther's predilection for scatology. Shows you what I know.
Mark Twain, who grew up in a small enough town, was impressed by the manure piles on German farms. In one of his travel books, he includes a mock romance of the Black Forest--the rejected, penurious suitor returns in triumph to interrupt the wedding, having discovered a manure mine. Braudel remarks somewhere that it was more important to have on hand in the rainy north, where otherwise the nutrients would wash out of the soil, but I don't know how much Braudel really knew about the matter.
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