Monkey love

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Monkey Love is a colloquial term for an "exaggerated" love , often from parents to their children.

The word and the phrase were used at least as early as the 18th century to denote an overly tender and loving upbringing that was considered unreasonable by the prevailing opinion of the time . The supposedly inappropriately affectionate attitude of monkey mothers towards their young, who almost crush and lick them, became the symbol of this way of upbringing.

As defined Pierer's Universal-Lexikon monkey love as "a harmful by exaggerating love for children because the Chimpanzee sometimes her young love to the heart so that it suffocated." And Adelung International Dictionary of the High German dialect as "a blind, unreasoning love , especially of the elderly towards their children, like that the monkeys have towards their young, which they often crush out of too great tenderness "as well as Kirchner / Michaëlis' dictionary of basic philosophical terms as" blind tenderness of the parents towards their children, which overlooks their mistakes , denies and harms them. "

Other meaning

Affenliebe is sometimes also paraphrased with the phrase "have eaten a monkey on someone". According to the Duden editorial team, “it probably refers to the idea of ​​a little goblin who haunts a person's head like an exuberant monkey when this person is walking, for example. B. drank alcohol or fell hopelessly in love. The observation that a mother monkey almost crushes her young with tenderness and seems to eat them up can also be the basis of this phrase. ”Colloquially,“ to have a monkey ”means to be intoxicated , to be drunk. In the drug scene one speaks of a monkey when, for example, withdrawal symptoms ("turkey") occur after using heroin , from which, for example, "pushing a monkey" was derived.

literature

  • Source: Duden, 11th edition, 1992, p. 29

Web links

Wiktionary: Affenliebe  - explanations of meanings, word origins , synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pierer's Universal Lexikon, Volume 1. Altenburg 1857, p. 154. online at zeno.org .
  2. ^ Adelung, Grammatical-Critical Dictionary of High German Dialect, Volume 1. Leipzig 1793, p. 174. online at zeno.org.
  3. ↑ Kirchner, Friedrich / Michaëlis, Carl: Dictionary of basic philosophical terms. Leipzig 1907, p. 26. online at zeno.org.
  4. ↑ Duden Newsletter of September 4, 2009 ( Memento of October 23, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ^ Affe duden.de, accessed on September 3, 2011
  6. ↑ Enno Freye: Opioids in medicine. Effect and areas of application of central analgesics, Springer-Verlag 2004, pp. 390f. online .