this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
846 points (95.2% liked)
Funny: Home of the Haha
5632 readers
604 users here now
Welcome to /c/funny, a place for all your humorous and amusing content.
Looking for mods! Send an application to Stamets!
Our Rules:
-
Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.
-
Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
Other Communities:
-
/c/TenForward@lemmy.world - Star Trek chat, memes and shitposts
-
/c/Memes@lemmy.world - General memes
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We have but it's a bit more complicated. "Schwul" is the old form (for hot and humid) and changed in analogy to "kühl" (~chilly/cool/cold). Simultaneously, homosexuality is associated with warmth for some reason. There is also "warmer Bruder" (warm brother).
So "schwul" was historically used for both senses "hot and humid" and figuratively for "gay", the literal sense changed vowel to be similar to another temperature related word, while the figurative sense didn't and they separated into two distinct words.
Extra difficult since the ü-sound isn't easy for many 2nd language learners so this happens quite often even if people know I suppose.
Thank you so much! I have an etymological dictionary for German, but I haven’t found anything for slang- do you know if something like that exists?
wiktionary is quite resourceful. Often the English page is even better but it's worth checking both.