The language thread

Where does the saying "to doublecross someone" come from and what does is originally mean ? Two crosses ?

doublecross (plural doublecrosses)

An instance of betrayal of one who has been led to believe that the betrayer was assisting thim.

I found this:

There is no definite origin but there are two possible stories of how it might have originated:

In the 1800s the word cross meant to fix a horse race. Double cross on the other hand was used to describe a fixed horse race where the horse was supposed to lose but at a later point turning it around to make it win again.

There is also the story about the London bounty hunter Jonathan Wilde, employed by the court, who kept a list of those criminals and others who he had done business with. When someone lost their value to him or cheated on him he added a second cross and turned them in to the authorities.
Eventually he was betrayed and hanged.

Thank you.

By the way, I had been reading the tale of that Jonathan Wild - a fascinating tale ! He was not a bounty hunter, but rather the head of a criminal gang whose members stole stuff from wealthy perons, and he claimed he would be able to get it back for them "for a fee", of which he later gave part to the thief - who of ourse belonged to his gang - and kept another part of the "fee" for himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wild

Jonathan Wild is famous today not so much for setting the example for organised crime as for the uses satirists made of his story.

When Wild was hanged, the papers were filled with accounts of his life, collections of his sayings, farewell speeches and the like. Daniel Defoe wrote one narrative for Applebee's Journal in May and then had published True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild in June 1725. This work competed with another that claimed to have excerpts from Wild's diaries. The illustration above is from the frontispiece to the "True Effigy of Mr. Jonathan Wild," a companion piece to one of the pamphlets purporting to offer the thief-taker's biography.

Criminal biography was a genre. These works offered a touching account of need, a fall from innocence, sex, violence and then repentance or a tearful end. Public fascination with the dark side of human nature and with the causes of evil, has never waned and the market for mass-produced accounts was large.

By 1701, there had been a Lives of the Gamesters (often appended to Charles Cotton's The Compleat Gamester), about notorious gamblers. In 1714 Captain Alexander Smith had written the best-selling Complete Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen. Defoe himself was no stranger to this market: his Moll Flanders was published in 1722. By 1725, Defoe had written a History and a Narrative of the life of Jack Sheppard (see above). Moll Flanders may be based on the life of one Moll King, who lived with Mary Mollineaux/Milliner, Wild's first mistress.

The figures of Peachum and Macheath were picked up by Bertolt Brecht for his updating of Gay's opera as The Threepenny Opera. The Sheppard character, Macheath, is the "hero" of the song Mack the Knife.

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, the arch-villain Professor Moriarty is referred to as a latter-day Jonathan Wild by Holmes41]

About one of his men who became famous in his own right because he managed to escape so many times : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Sheppard



Besides, I have found these 2 links via the computing magazine I'm regularly reading :

https://lingyourlanguage.com/

https://www.languagesquad.com/

I'd love to be able to do accents like this.

If "poaching" is illegal hunting, why is then the word "poaching" for a special cooking method looking the same ?
According to Wikipedia Germany, the cooking term has French origins.

Yep, comes from the word "poche" (pocket).

Recently several municipalities have been merged in Norway. With new municipalites also comes the need for new slogans. There is a tendency that many slogans like tend to use lots of fancy words without saying much useful. Like the one selected by Grong: "Et aktivt og robust regionsenter med livskvalitet og mangfold" ("An active and stromg region scenter with quality of living, and diversity"). Ouch!!!

I think we should be able to do better.

One thing we shouldn't do however is ask the people. Like Ullensvang did. One of the suggestions was "Ullensvang – jævla bra kommune for faen" which translates to (I deliberately avoid special characters in this context)): "Ullensvang - a fucking nice municipality, dammit." Needless to say (saying it anyway), this slogan won the poll. And needless to say (still saying it) the result was rejected.

Some of the merges were not very well received. Especially the merge of the much larger communities. One of the least popular is the merging of Troms and Finnmark. As you can see from the map, this one is huge, around 20% of the total area of Norway, but still the least densely populated community (less than 5% of the total population of Norway):

The local government came up with the idea of asking the people what the new community should be called. The winner was "Mordor". The name selected was "Troms And Finnmark".

a pibbur who now lives in the "Vestland" community.

PS. Some years ago, the town Steinkjer used the slogan "IT-byen Steinkjer" ("The IT town, Steinkjer"), to indicate that they were a modern town with a focus on computer technology. They changed their mind when people started spraying "SK" in front of the IT ("SH" in English) on road signs. DS.

Originally Posted by a pibbur
Some of the merges were not very well received.

Germany has had "not well received" mergers of its own. Baden-Württemberg is such an example. Both parts still don't like each other terribly well.

Other mergers were done within attempts to merge bigger towns with smaller villages. Cologne is such an example. That was common, and people not always liked it (my own town is such an example - a merger between an old, several hundred years old town with a newish town that was almost still a village, but had - and still has - a HUGE chemical plant at its border).

What's also common are jokes between members of various parts of the country. (I think we had this already mentioned here somewhere).

a pibbur who observes that the Quenya word for "bear" is "morco".

You Nordmenn call them bjorn, which is also a name given to boys. Why would someone call their child bear?

Originally Posted by Myrthos
You Nordmenn call them bjorn, which is also a name given to boys. Why would someone call their child bear?

I think animal derived names originally were used to give the impression of power.

We also have the name "ulv" and "ulf" from the Norwegian word for "wolf". The name "Varg" also refers to the wolf.

The name "Arne" comes from "Orn" (eagle). My dad's name was Arnfred which means something like one who the eagle likes.

Other animals we find as names include the falcon ("Falk"), the swan ("Svanhild"), the moose ("Elg"). Worms ("Orm").There are others. Some sites claim that the female name "Jorunn" derives from the old Norse word for wild pigs, others say it's a horse .

"pibbur" derives from the Norwegian postal service.

What this comic illustrates very good, by the way, is the common fear of saying the actual , the "true" names of holy or of powerful entities.

We have this still in the Jewish religion, for example.

I once read in an (non-Wikipedia) article that Rome had a secret name. It is lost now as well, as very few knew it (or so I have this article in my mnemory) and there was some kind of … omerta ? that no-one was allowed to speak it or otherwise make it public. One who did it, the article said, was killed.

Secrets as such - in general - were a sign of power. Withholding "hidden knowledge" was apparingly a sign of power. And maybe of holiness, too.

The Mithraism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism is poorly understood, for example, because it was a "secret religion", which means that its members were not allowed to speakl about it. So, most knowledge about it is lost.

There exists an ancient Egyptian text named "Admonitions of Ipuwer" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipuwer_Papyrus , which complains that "there are no secrets anymore", among other things. He complaints that several times within that text.

A distant echo of this ban to speak a real or "true" name is found within the Harry Potter novels : There is an adversary whose name is almost never spoken (or at least very rarely), but instead described as "you-know-who" or as "who-must-not-be-named".

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
…
The Mithraism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism is poorly understood, for example, because it was a "secret religion", which means that its members were not allowed to speakl about it. So, most knowledge about it is lost.
…

Rule 1: You don't talk about the fight club.
Rule 2: You don't talk about the fight club.

a pibbur who found what the German said interesting, but still chose to be somewhat off-topic.

The importance of correct grammar:


a pibbur, the pibbur, the pibburs

Originally Posted by a pibbur
The importance of correct grammar:

Last year or the year before that someone sprayed that on a REAL roman wall within Cologne. It wasn't seen as funny by the local Archaeologists.

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
Last year or the year before that someone sprayed that on a REAL roman wall within Cologne. It wasn't seen as funny by the local Archaeologists.

I can imagine that.

a pibbur who finds only the MP implementation funny.

Taken from the Daily Smile thread : As an answer to pibbur's explanation :
https://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/show…postcount=3048

Originally Posted by a pibbur
"istervom"

Funnily, this word can even be translated from German language ! It looks as if it consists of several words : It's like "ishefrom" ("is he from ?") , but this compount in this form doesn't exist in German language. Whereas "vom" is I think Dativ case ?

"Vom" usually means "from a place", country, house, building, stable … I think.
Plus, "vom" is a compound of "von dem".
Further reading : https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vom#German

Please note that "von" like in "von Stauffenberg" is *not* the same as "vom" !

I actually once read a second name containing "vom" : "vom see", which means "from the lake". It's a one in a million name like that, though. Extremely uncommon.

Originally Posted by a pibbur
Another expression: "Gammel Erik"="Old Eric" which means "the devil".

"Gammel" roughly means in German language "laziness". "Gammel Erik" would translate as "Lazy Erik", then.

A "Gammler" is someone who is exeedingly lazy. Basically an insult.
It is also used by Nazis to insult beggars, as they look as if they were only lying around and doing nothing, which is what a "Gammler" would do.

I just noticed that the English "profane" is not like the German "profan".
The German "profan" is more = the English "mundane".