German Word-of-the-Day for Owlet: Day 4

[muckefuck]

die Demut "humility, meekness"

Now that you've learned it, you can promptly forget it again, since you'll never use it except maybe in the past tense. HA!

This one has an interesting history that I only delved into today: The first element is related to the word dienen "serve" and meant "slave". (It shows up in Ivanhoe as "theow".) The second element is der Mut which now means "courage" but was once a much broader term (as can be seen by it's etymological connexion to English mood).

In Old High German, forming an adjective was once as simple as sticking two nouns together and slapping adjective inflections on the second one. Now things are a little more regulated and speakers prefer proper derivational endings like -ig, so the modern adjective is demütig. From this we get the verb demütigen "humiliate". Slap on the abstract deverbal ending -ung and you've got die Demütigung "humiliation".

Comments

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

Does that mean that the phrase "Mother Courage" has a repeated "Mut...mut..." sound in it?

[pne.livejournal.com]

"Mutter Mut"?

Two different "u" sounds, though -- the first has the vowel sound of "put", the second roughly that of "boot".

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with such a phrase. The German title of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children is Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder. I'm not acquainted with the use of die Courage (pronounced /ku'ra:ʒə/) in colloquial German, but LEO defines die Zivilcourage as "moral courage; the courage to stand up for one's beliefs".

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

My arrogance is all bluster.

(I played the lead in Brecht's The Good Woman of Szechuan in college. What a play. Oh, that Kurt Weill. I could just eat him up.)

[0595.livejournal.com]

I had a dream last night that I visited Germany, and then I walked over to China and had sex with Justin Timberlake.