
Heimscheißer meaning: The German word for people who can't poop anywhere but home
The Germans, in their wonderfully blunt way, have a word for this situation: Heimscheißer. Heimscheißer (say it with us: HIME-shy-ser) is a German slang term that literally translates to 'home sh*tter'. Yes, it's real. And yes, it's way too relatable. This delightful word describes someone who can only do their business in the safety and comfort of their own toilet. Public restrooms? Office loos? Friend's house? Nope.
It's home or nothing.
What is the Heimscheißer meaning and where does it come from?
The Heimscheißer meaning goes beyond just bathroom habits. It captures that very specific kind of anxiety some people feel when they're anywhere but home and the urge hits. It's not officially a medical condition, but it is culturally recognised, especially in German humour.
The term combines two German words:
Heim = home
Scheißer = someone who poops
Together, they form the perfect nickname for people who simply can't go unless everything feels just right — the lighting, the silence, the scent of your usual soap, and a door that actually locks.
Why do people become Heimscheißers?
There are a few reasons. For some, it's about comfort and routine. For others, it's genuine social anxiety — specifically, a condition known as parcopresis, or 'shy bowel syndrome'.
This is when someone feels physically unable to relieve themselves in unfamiliar or public settings, often due to fear of being overheard or judged.Some folks just don't trust public toilets — and can you blame them? They're often loud, crowded, dirty, or just way too exposed.
The Heimscheißer feels more at peace on their own porcelain throne, complete with familiar floor tiles, ambient lighting, and zero audience.While the term Heimscheißer might make you laugh, it also reflects something real: our need for privacy, safety, and control—especially when we're at our most vulnerable (yes, pooping is peak vulnerability).
It's a quirky reminder that language can wrap humour around very human experiences.
So if you're the kind of person who'll hold it in all day just to get home and use your bathroom — don't feel ashamed. You, my friend, are a certified Heimscheißer. Wear the title with pride (and maybe carry some air freshener just in case).
Also read|
Did The Simpsons really predict the Coldplay 'kiss cam' scandal? CEO's viral moment sparks AI confusion and meme buzz

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Scroll.in
2 hours ago
- Scroll.in
A 16th-century Chinese writer spoke of workplace burnout, creating a design for radical acts of rest
We are in the middle of a global workplace burnout epidemic — aptly named the 'burnout society ' by Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Four centuries ago, late Ming Dynasty scholar-official Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610) shifted from state administrative work to xiaopin – brief, personal essays celebrating everyday pleasures like gardening, leisurely excursions and long vigils beside a rare blossom. Today, his Ming Dynasty-era practice resonates with uncanny urgency within our burnout epidemic. Amid the Wanli Emperor's neglect and escalating bureaucratic infighting in Beijing, Yuan turned away from what today we call a 'toxic workplace.' Instead, he found refuge in Jiangnan's landscapes and literary circles. There he exchanged hierarchical pressures, administrative tedium and cut-throat careerism for moments of unhurried attention. Yuan's xiaopin, alongside those of his contemporaries, transformed fleeting sensory moments into radical acts of resilience, suggesting that beauty, not institutions, could outlast empires. The Ming Dynasty: A literary rebellion The late Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) was an era of contradictions. While Europe hurtled toward colonialism and scientific rationalism, China's Jiangnan region – the fertile Yangtze Delta in today's Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces – flourished via merchant wealth, global silver trade and a thriving print culture. Bookshops lined city streets like modern cafés. They peddled plays, poetry and xiaopin volumes like Meiyou Pavilion of Arts and Leisure (1630) and Sixteen Xiaopin Masters of the Imperial Ming (1633). The imperial examination system, a civil service written exam – once a path to prestige – had become a bottleneck. Thousands of scholars languished in bureaucratic limbo, channelling their frustrations and exhaustion into xiaopin 's intimate vignettes. In his preface to Meiyou Pavilion, editor Zheng Yuanxun (1603–1644) praised the genre's 'flavour beyond flavour, rhythm beyond rhythm' – a poetic nod to its rich sensory detail and subtle musicality – rejecting moralising orthodox prose by embracing immersive aesthetics. Against neo-Confucianism 's rigid hierarchies, xiaopin elevated the private, the ephemeral and the esthetically oblique: a well-brewed pot of tea, the texture of moss on a garden rock and incense wafting through a study. Wei Shang, professor of Chinese culture at Columbia University, has noted such playful text flourished among late Ming literati disillusioned with the era's constraints. The texts reframed idleness and sensory pleasure as subtle dissent within a status-obsessed society. When doing less becomes radical Long before French poet Charles Baudelaire's flâneur used dandyism and idle promenades to resist the alienating pace of western modernity, Ming literati like Chen Jiru (1558–1639) and Gao Lian (1573–1620) framed idleness as defiance. Drawing on Daoist wu wei (non-action), Gao praised the 'crystal clear retreat' that scrubbed the heart of 'worldly grime' and cultivated 'a tranquil heart and joyful spirit.' For him, human worth lay not in bureaucratic promotions but in savouring tea, listening to crickets or resting against a well-fluffed pillow. Hung-tai Wang, a cultural historian at Academia Sinica in Taipei, identifies xiaopin as a 'leisurely and elegant' aesthetic rooted in nature's rhythms. Chen Jiru, a Ming Dynasty-era painter and essayist, embodied this framework by disallowing transactional logic. In one essay, Chen lauds those who possess 'poetry without words, serenity without sutras, joy without wine.' In other words, he admired those whose lives resonated through prioritizing lived gestures over abstract ideals. In the late Ming's burgeoning urban and commercial milieu, xiaopin turned everyday objects into remedies for social isolation. In the Jiangnan gardens, late Ming essayists saw landscapes infused with emotion. At the time, essayist Wu Congxian called it 'lodging meaning among mountains and rivers:' moonlight turned into icy jade, oar splashes to cosmic echoes. Chen Jiru had study rituals – fingering a bronze cauldron, tapping an inkstone – curating what he termed 'incense for solitude, tea for clarity, stone for refinement.' This cultivation of object-as-presence anticipates American literary scholar Bill Brown's 'thing theory,' where everyday items invite embodied contemplation and challenge the subject-object binary that enables commodification. The Ming Dynasty-era scholar-connoisseur, Wen Zhenheng (1585–1645), turned domestic minutiae into philosophical resistance. His xiaopin framed everyday choices – snowmelt for tea, rooms facing narrow water, a skiff 'like a study adrift' – as rejections of abstraction. Through details like cherries on porcelain or tangerines pickled before ripening, he asserted that value lies in presence, not utility. Wen suggests that exhaustion stems not from labour but from disconnection. The burnout rebellions: ' Tang ping,' 'quiet quitting' Just as xiaopin turned domestic rituals into resistance, today's movements recast the mundane as a mode of defiance. In April 2021, China's tang ping ('lying flat') movement surfaced with a post by former factory worker Luo Huazhong: 'Lying flat is justice.' The message was simple and subversive: work had become intolerable, and opting out was not laziness but resistance. In a backlash against China's '996' work model extolled by tech moguls like Jack Ma, tang ping rejects the sacrifice of dignity and mental health for productivity and casts idleness as a quiet revolt against exploitative norms. In the West, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked similar reckonings. The ' Great Resignation ' saw millions leave unfulfilling jobs. And 'quiet quitting' rejected unpaid overtime and emotional labour. These movements emerged as a soft refusal of hustle culture. As anthropologist David Graeber argues in Bullshit Jobs (2018), the 'moral and spiritual damage' inflicted by meaningless work reflects a profound political failure. Just like the late Ming literati who poured their lives into a state that repaid them with hollow titles and bureaucratic decay, today's workers withdraw from institutions that exploit their labour yet treat them as disposable. Unlike French philosopher Michel de Montaigne's introspective self-examination in his Renaissance-era Essays, xiaopin refuses utility. In doing so, it inverts the contemporary self-help trend critiqued by Byung-Chul Han, which co-opts personal ' healing ' as a form of productivity through neoliberal logic. Xiaopin proposes resistance as an existential shift beyond (self-) optimisation. Its most radical gesture is not to demand change, but to live as if the system's demands are irrelevant. Xiaopin asks: What is progress without presence? Its fragments – on lotus ponds, summer naps, a cat's shadow – prove that resistance need not be loud. Like Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's vision of contemporary literature as 'a space of individual recovery,' the genre shelters us from 'hierarchy and efficiency.' Here, time is not spent but reclaimed. To pause in an age of weaponised ambition is in fact revolt. Tracing a petal's vein, sipping tea until bitterness fades, lying flat as the machinery of productivity grinds on – these are not acts of shirking reality, but defiant gestures against the systems that feed on our exhaustion. They are affirmations of agency: microcosms where we rehearse what it means to belong to ourselves, and thus, to the world. Xiaopin 's revolution awakens in a flicker of attention: a reminder that presence, too, is a language – one that hums beneath the buzz of progress, waiting to be heard. Jason Wang is Postdoctoral Fellow, Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University.


Time of India
20 hours ago
- Time of India
Coimbatore corporation bets big on eco-bloc tech to harvest rainwater
Coimbatore: The city corporation has sent a proposal to the state govt to implement an eco-bloc-based rainwater harvesting project in its limits at a cost of Rs100 crore. According to corporation commissioner M Sivaguru Prabakaran, the project would be executed with either govt or external funding at 100 locations in the city. "Sometimes, it will be a combination of govt and external funding. The capacity of rainwater harvesting structures will vary based on the requirements of each identified location. The cost will also vary accordingly. Residential areas prone to waterlogging have been mapped to set up rainwater harvesting structures." He said the proposal was drafted based on a survey that the civic body conducted to identify the flood-prone areas, rainfall intensity in each locality, required length of rainwater harvesting structures and the necessary customization of eco-blocs. This German eco-bloc technology was adopted in the city earlier as part of the Smart City Mission project at Race Course after Chennai successfully implemented the same to harvest rainwater. This technology offers a customized structure easy for maintenance. Another highlight is minimal siltation. Even the run off rainwater could be stored for reuse. The eco-bloc module structure is made of recycled polyethylene materials. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Tegalbuleud: Unsold Sofas May Be at Bargain Prices (Prices May Surprise You) Sofas | Search Ads Search Now Undo The installation process includes the use of two geotextile liners and two stone filters. The geotextile liners help prevent accumulation of silt within the eco-bloc modules. These blocks are easy to install and said to last for more than a decade. The eco-bloc-based rainwater harvesting structures have been set up at the upcoming Semmozhi Poonga at the central prison grounds. While the structures are yet to be put to use, the plan is to store rainwater in tanks with a storage capacity of 15 lakh litres to be later used for irrigation purposes. A few schools in the city, including the corporation middle school at Edayarpalayam, also have set up eco-bloc-based rainwater harvesting structures.

Mint
a day ago
- Mint
AI-717 plane crash: Air India disburses interim compensation of ₹25 lakh to 166 families
Almost one and a half month after the tragic plane crash in Ahmedabad, Air India on Saturday said that they have disbursed interim compensation of ₹ 25 lakh each to 166 families affected by the AI-717 crash. Releasing an official press release on the website, Air India said that so far AI released the interim compensation to the families of 147 of the 229 deceased passengers and also the 19 who lost their lives at the accident site. "Air India has, so far, released the interim compensation to the families of 147 of the 229 deceased passengers and also the 19 who lost their lives at the accident site," Air India said in a statement. The airliner added, among other things, that the requisite documents of 52 others have been verified, and the interim compensation to those families will be released progressively. The private airliner, run by Tata Group, said that they stands in solidarity with the families affected by the AI171 accident. "We continue to mourn their loss and remain fully committed to providing support during this difficult time," Air India said. Air India also said Tata Group has also registered 'The AI-171 Memorial and Welfare Trust' which is dedicated to the victims of the tragic accident. It added that Tata Trust pledged an ex gratia payment of ₹ 1 crore in respect of each of the deceased and would support for rebuilding the B.J. Medical College Hostel infrastructure. Air India also mentioned that Tata Trust will provide aid and assistance to alleviate any trauma or distress suffered by the first responders, medical and disaster relief professionals, social workers, and governmental staff who provided invaluable institutional support and service in the aftermath of the accident. Earlier on 12 June, Air India flight AI-717 from Ahmedabad to London's Gatwick crashed moments after taking off from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport. In the tragic crash, 241 passengers and 19 people on ground were killed.