Illuminati-R-Us

For the 'Interesting German Word of the Day' series.
Saw it in an article in regard to one of our hockey commentators who has a penchant for bad puns.

Ha!

And an extremely interesting one at that, linguistically.

"Witz" is cognate with "wit", but doesn't mean the same anymore - although it used to in older German texts and in the pseudo-old German of the Wagner operas, Witz actually used to mean wit, wittyness, intelligence, intellectual agility, etc.

But in modern German, Witz just means "joke" - the meaning has grown a lot narrower, and less interesting. And the verb derived from it, "witzeln" does mean to make jokes, in a distinctly pejoritive sense - meaning making, flat, bad, lame jokes.

Sucht, oh, you will like this. Sucht (fem.) is a nominalization of a verb. And you (I am looking at you, Mactep and Richard_A) might be tempted to think that the verb it originates from is "suchen" - cognate with "to seek", and meaning just that. But no, the verb it belongs to is "siechen" (hardly used anymore) - cognate with "sick", meaning, to be ill. So Witzelsucht ist the disease that makes you make jokes; in modern German, the word "Sucht" isn't just synonymous with disease, it is used in a narrower sense to denote dependence or substance abuse disorders - if someone has swollen legs from heart failure, we don't call this "Wassersucht" anymore (although we do call jaundice "Gelbsucht"), but we regularly talk about Alkoholsucht, Heroinsucht, Nikotinsucht, etc.

So Witzelsucht is not only a disesase that makes you make stupid jokes, it is a disease that makes you crave to make stupid jokes. In psychopathology, it is an actual medical term denoting a symptom in certain manifestations of schizophrenia.

Nifty, eh?

Next up, Kleinod - a word that is extremely beautiful, itself a Kleinod, but sadly it is on the way out. Hardly used any more.

Thanks for that explanation. When I asked my dad about the word, he thought exactly as you said, that sucht would be seek or search, so I looked it up and was given suche for search, but sucht was said to be addiction or obsession.

That suchts.

In this context, the German word for hospital is Krankenhaus, house of the sick. The word in Dutch is ziekenhuis. So yeah, siechen.

Arneb wrote:And you (I am looking at you, Mactep and Richard_A) might be tempted to think that the verb it originates from is "suchen" - cognate with "to seek", and meaning just that.

Well, yes, I did think that

I thought maybe it meant a joke (or perhaps a teller of jokes) in search of wittiness.

I did come across one recently that I hadn't seen before - dead trousers.

Tote Hose - that's nice innit? We have a punk band by that name. To the interested audience - anyone have any idea what it means?

Arneb wrote:Tote Hose - that's nice innit? We have a punk band by that name.

I believe that's how I came across it.

Arneb wrote:To the interested audience - anyone have any idea what it means?

I think I've got the usage right, but I'm not entirely sure.

Perhaps this would be a good pub quiz team name.

ETA - come to think of it, I came across it while searching for band names to use in the "add a word, ruin a band" thread.

I guess it's hard to ruon the name more by adding a word.

Supposedly it was trending as slang a few years back: https://germanyinusa.com/2019/01/04/wor ... tote-hose/

Arneb wrote:In this context, the German word for hospital is Krankenhaus, house of the sick.

Around here, a crack house is very different.

g-one wrote:Supposedly it was trending as slang a few years back: https://germanyinusa.com/2019/01/04/wor ... tote-hose/

Interestingly, I'd disagree with one aspect of the article on germanyinusa.com: That the word had nothing to with pants. It seems to be one of the expression that has taken the road form more to less sexual connotation. Tote Hose can very definitely mean that nothing much is going on "in the pants", but it is more than that.