During this period Marx’s writings are very annoying to read in their original German language because he has the tendency to constantly mix in English vocabulary and expressions. He had been living in England for about a decade at this point. It seems in doing so he also adopted some of the Anglos’ nasty linguistic habits.
It kinda reminds me of the polish word “Murzyn”. It’s pretty archaic, ethymologically come from latin “maurus” either though german “Mohr” (for people of Maghreb) or from polish “murzyć” (“to blacken something”), due to not much historical contacts it really means something roughly similar to “negro” and just as that word it was and still used in very different contexts. And due to that, it was deemed not racist enough for racists and so an entirely mirror to n-word was coined (“czarnuch”, this one have only one context).
Today, it is officially (by Polish Language Council for example) unadvised to use the word “Murzyn”, since it became more and more pejorative in recent 3 decades, though it’s still a bit ambigous since even some black people living in Poland defended it.
Conclusion, such words can be loaded even in one’s native language, and he should know better to throw in foreign slang he might heard on the street.
That’s another good question to raise; I make no bones about being angry about being an Amerikan-- so as a result, I can’t say I know German culture like that to know if there’s a lesser-degree offensiveness in the mother tongue that got changed over.
There is. Replace the first I with an E and remove one of the Gs. Nowadays it’s obviously extremely offensive but as far as I know back then - even though still offensive - it wasn’t as bad. Kind of like the English term ending with O.
I wonder if the original German uses an equivalent term or if the translation is just off
During this period Marx’s writings are very annoying to read in their original German language because he has the tendency to constantly mix in English vocabulary and expressions. He had been living in England for about a decade at this point. It seems in doing so he also adopted some of the Anglos’ nasty linguistic habits.
It kinda reminds me of the polish word “Murzyn”. It’s pretty archaic, ethymologically come from latin “maurus” either though german “Mohr” (for people of Maghreb) or from polish “murzyć” (“to blacken something”), due to not much historical contacts it really means something roughly similar to “negro” and just as that word it was and still used in very different contexts. And due to that, it was deemed not racist enough for racists and so an entirely mirror to n-word was coined (“czarnuch”, this one have only one context).
Today, it is officially (by Polish Language Council for example) unadvised to use the word “Murzyn”, since it became more and more pejorative in recent 3 decades, though it’s still a bit ambigous since even some black people living in Poland defended it.
Conclusion, such words can be loaded even in one’s native language, and he should know better to throw in foreign slang he might heard on the street.
That’s another good question to raise; I make no bones about being angry about being an Amerikan-- so as a result, I can’t say I know German culture like that to know if there’s a lesser-degree offensiveness in the mother tongue that got changed over.
There is. Replace the first I with an E and remove one of the Gs. Nowadays it’s obviously extremely offensive but as far as I know back then - even though still offensive - it wasn’t as bad. Kind of like the English term ending with O.