Re: OT: Slang, curses and vulgarities

Hi!

Steven Williams <feurieaux@...> writes:
>  --- "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...> schrieb:
>
> > Intensifiers that originate in the vulgar language
> > may become part of the
> > unmarked, educated standard one day, as has happened
> > e.g. in the German word
> > _sehr_ 'much': It's original meaning is still
> > preserved in English _sore_,
> > and there are some German dialect that still
> > preserve that use alongside the
> > standard German one.
>
> Wow, that's interesting! I was wondering where 'sehr'
> came from, or whether there were an English cognate,
> and it turns out to be 'sore'. That fits perfectly.
Actually, there is one common German word that uses the stem in its
original meaning: 'unversehrt', meaning 'unbroken', 'unscathed',
'undamaged', 'without any injury or damage' (usually used for people,
i.e., cognate to 'sore').  Its morpheme breakup is 'un-ver-sehr-t',
thus negation 'un-' plus the perfect passive partiple of a verb
*'versehren', which is not in use (anymore).

I heard the positive form 'versehrt' only once (that I remember): it
was when someone commented on a terrible train accident where some 200
people where killed, and he used 'all die versehrten Leichen' to
describe what the place was like.  It gave me the impression of a
*very* strong way to speak of 'all the broken corpses'.

**Henrik

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