Occasional musings, Geistesblitze, photos, drawings etc. by a "resident alien", who has landed on American soil from a far-away planet called "Germany".

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Word of the month: Unschuldslamm

UnschuldslammUnschuldslamm combines Unschuld (innocence) with Lamm (lamb). The term refers to a person claiming innocence w.r.t. some misdeed. It's typically used in sentences like "he plays (or acts) the Unschuldslamm"; i.e. there is a strong implication that the claim is false, like when someone says, "I didn't do it!".

Both the timing of and the drawing for this WoM were inspired by the current FIFA World Cup held in S. Africa, where we can watch, in match after match, players committing fouls and then acting the Unschuldslamm with precisely the gesture shown.

BTW Unschuld is formed by prefixing Schuld ("guilt") with un, which can be used to turn the meaning of a noun or adjective into its opposite--cf. English "unknown" or "undead".

[Source: Wild Things in the German Language: Kindle version | iBook version]

6 comments:

Hempstead said...

Sort of like the Fins making 1mb connection a "right."

Riiiiiight, everybody knows it's BS, but the Fins are serving up straight faces. How do I know it's another ends-justify-the-means BS? The fact that they did not list air, water, and food as part of Finnish basic right is a dead give away to me. Give me Internet or give me death!

Somebody either needs to get his or her priority straight or stop insulting our intelligence, and act like a ...

Hempstead said...

I suppose I am obliged to translate for the non-Mandarin speaking folx.

"一個人的價值,應該看他貢獻了什麼,而不是他取得了什麼..."

"The value/worth of a person, should/shall be determined by what s/he contributes, but not what s/he takes/gets/gains..."

Ulrich said...

@Jonah: We non-Mandarin speakers need also an explanation of the connections between the video you get when you click on the dots and "The value/worth of a person, should/shall be determined by what s/he contributes, but not what s/he takes/gets/gains..." In addition, we need a connection between this and Unschuldslamm:-)

Hempstead said...

What video? I don't see any video.

The real reason I translated that sentence is that I am not able to make the connection either. It makes absolutely no sense to me in this context. So I am hoping somebody here could.

Perhaps it's one of those web site traffic generator postings?

Ulrich said...

@Jonah: When you click on the dots, you come to a website of some young Asian woman that also shows her in a video. This is happening a lot lately--I think they are using 'innocent' blogs like mine to direct traffic to their websites--I don't know what they really offer. It has happened to every post I created. I normally remove these (when you see "comment removed by the administrator", it was one of these)--the only ones I left were the ones that posted under "Schmusekatze", where "sex kittens" kind of fit.

I didn't get to removing the one under Unschuldslamm before you posted--so I'm treating it as some joke.

Hempstead said...

Now it's pretty clear to me that these are some porn spammers.