Mfcttrf

In an IM, I just wrote:

Ich hab ihr halt eine unverfängliche Frage gestellt. Das ist alles! <schwitz>

I sometimes use "schwitz" like this -- in place of its corresponding emoticons: 😅, 💦, ^^; -- to express the idea of "breaking out in a nervous sweat".

I've always wondered why, even though it is the speaker him/herself, namely I in this case, who is sweating, you need to use the 2nd Person Singular Imperative "schwitz" instead of the seemingly more logical 1st Person Indicative "schwitze" or the 3rd Person "schwitzt"?

The same goes for the 2nd Person Singular Imperative "zwinker", which I use when I make a funny or ironic remark. In this case, too, why not use the 1st Person Indicative "zwinkere" or the 3rd Person "zwinkert" instead?

And the list goes on and on...

Not imperative:

Knutsch mich ab!

*abknutsch*

The form looks like an infinitive with the ending -en removed and has been given the jocular name Erikativ (after the woman who translated Disney comics into German, Erika Fuchs).

One difficulty when talking about this form is that its use has changed heavily over time. Wilhelm Busch is famous for using single words looking like Erikative to denote sounds:

Ratsch!!, Puff!!, Knacks!!, Schwapp!!, Ruff!! (source)

These words are supposed to have come about by way of onomatopoeia and have been classified as interjections. But note that Ratsch and Puff are also masculine nouns. Knacks has an ending -s that a few similar nouns have, e.g. Bums, Plumps, Knips, Rums. Of the quoted words, only ruff is a new coinage as far as I can tell.

The forms we encounter in modern-day electronic communication are different in that they are not limited to denoting sounds and can be extended into verb-like phrases:

*arbeit_wegleg* und […] jetzt beide daumen ganz fest drück!!! (source)

Indeed, as David Vogt writes, this is not the imperative form.

I am writing separately to address the question of why that particular form is used. I am not quite sure I follow David's suggestion here that the reason may be to "try to parallel the difference between to plus infinitive and a bare infinitive" because - at least for the most part (see below) - the inflective simply is the bare verb stem: abknutsch-, zwinker-, lauf-, trief-, stöhn- etc. This behaviour is preserved when complements are added (*traurigsei*, *schweißvonderstirnwisch* etc.).[1]

It should be added that a few particular verbs seem to behave differently, e.g. sein (also realised as *bin*) and, perhaps most importantly, wollen (which only occurs as *will*, never *woll*). However, it is generally believed that these first person singulars are replacement forms. The debate on why they are used has not been settled yet and there may be different reasons from case to case. (Teuber would point out, for example, that woll- is not productive anymore and therefore speakers perceive it as "wrong".)

[1] See Teuber, fasel beschreib erwähn – Der Inflektiv als Wortform des Deutschen, Germanistische Linguistik 141/142, 1998, 7-26; Hentschel/Vogel, Deutsche Morphologie, 2009.

My prosaic approach to interpreting the

knutsch

renn

flenn

türzuschlag

form, introduced in D. Vogt's answer as correctly as jocularly as Erikative, would be:

This is actually simply the root of the verb.

See here:

knutsch/-en/-e/-st/-t/-en/-en/-en

renn/-en/-e/-st/-t/-en/-en/-en

flenn/-en/-e/-st/-t/-en/-en/-en

zuschlag/-en, schlage zu, schlägst zu, schlägt zu, schlagen zu...

So this would be the rule for creating for new such expressions. In my opinion, it is productive.