The comic elephant by comedian Otto Waalkes (74) has made it into the Duden, the German spelling dictionary. This makes the inventor of the little Ottifant extremely proud, as he shows with his Instagram post.
For a screenshot of the Duden entry he writes: “Staaark – my Ottifant is now in the Duden!” As befits a comedian, he garnishes the message with a joke. Because it goes on to say: “Now I can always read how to spell and pronounce it correctly, where it actually comes from and even what its genitive is like. I didn’t even know that it had a genitive – he never showed it to me.” . With his famous “Holdrio” he closes his message to the almost 390,000 followers.
The fans are happy for Waalkes. Under the post they joke “…I’m just missing an Ottifant Emoji”, “Why am I hearing your voice while reading” or “Only now?”. Another user writes admiringly: “Now you could (please not) retire. That’s all you can do. Come up with a word and get it included in the dictionary. Awesome”.
Otto was already drawing the cute pachyderms when he was at school, as his music publisher says: “They brought me bread for a few good Ottifanten drawings. My mother always made funny ones that didn’t taste good,” the Emden native is quoted as saying.
