Insulted liverwurst
The huff or insulted liverwurst play is a proverbial German figure of speech by which a man mocked is who is offended or sulking. Most of the time it is assumed that the person so named has no reason to be offended.
The phrase has been in use since the late 19th century.
Background of the phrase
The background to this saying is the humoral pathological or physiological conception of ancient and medieval medicine that the liver is the seat (or "storage location") of the juices of life and thus the cause of temperaments . Anger in particular was suspected here. This idea persisted in the German language until the 17th and 18th centuries, as literary evidence shows. This is how Paul Fleming (1609–1640) wrote in his spring wedding poems:
“The liver has not been incorporated into us in vain:
it, it is our God, who drives us to love.
Whoever cannot love at all knows that instead of
the liver he has rotten wood and a bofist. "
Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) expresses it even more clearly in his Hexameron von Rosenhain :
"This news was more than was necessary, to nip in the bud the passion that was about to begin to form in his heart or (as the ancients believed) in his liver."
The saying “say something freely or freshly from the liver”, which means open, unreserved and frank speaking, has the same background. The saying that someone “ran a louse over their liver” is very similar to the “insulted liver sausage”: Here it is a trivial occasion - the little louse - that leads to irritation and anger. It is possible that in this context the name of a prudish or prudish lady, which has been proven since 1920, is to be seen as “fine liver sausage”.
The “sausage” was only added to the proverb when the idea of the liver as the seat of emotions was lost. So an etiological story was invented for the already existing saying of the "insulted liver sausage" , which is attested for Upper Saxony and describes the origin of the phrase: A butcher cooked sausages and all the other sausages that did not have to cook that long before Liver sausage taken from the cauldron. Because she had to stay alone in the kettle, the liver sausage was offended and finally burst with anger.
See also
Web links
Remarks
- ^ A b Heinz Küpper: Dictionary of German colloquial language , 1st edition, 6th reprint. Klett, Stuttgart, Munich, Düsseldorf, Leipzig 1997, page 489 f .; Lemma liver sausage .
- ↑ Cf. also with regard to the bile, the phrase "He is overflowing with bile."
- ↑ The warm liver produces the blood and, as an excretion product, the yellow bile (cholera) , in contrast to the black bile, melancholia , which is produced in the spleen . The cold liver releases half-digested food (chylus) as mucus (phlegm) into the blood vessels. The best blood, for example for the production of drugs from pigeon blood, could accordingly be obtained from the liver vein (vena hepatica) on the right side “fresh from the liver”. Cf. Gundolf Keil: "blutken - bloedekijn". Notes on the etiology of the hyposphagma genesis in the 'Pommersfeld Silesian Eye Booklet' (1st third of the 15th century). With an overview of the ophthalmological texts of the German Middle Ages. In: Specialized prose research - Crossing borders. Volume 8/9, 2012/2013, pp. 7–175, here: pp. 56, 65, 75 and 104.
- ↑ a b Lutz Röhrich: Lexicon of the proverbial sayings , 5 volumes, Freiburg i. Br. 1991, Vol. 2 and 3, pp. 944 f .; Lemma: liver .
- ↑ Original poem on the website of the Northeimer database German poem
- ↑ Chapter Love without Passion (quoted from Project Gutenberg-DE )
- ↑ The big book of quotations and phrases. Dudenverlag / FA Brockhaus, Mannheim / Leipzig / Vienna / Zurich 2002, ISBN 3-411-71801-3 , page 98.