Fenugreek (idiom)

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The saying: "Someone to Bockhorn hunt" means someone push, intimidate, confuse or lure on the wrong track into a corner.

origin

The origin of the expression is unclear. The earliest literary evidence goes back to the 15th century and shows that the original meaning was lost back then, because they are not uniform in terms of meaning and therefore give little information about the origin.

Examples: In a commemorative publication of the Sterzinger Carnival Games: "in ain Pochs hear drift"; in the ship of fools : "Germans are incompatible with fools / Thun before frydienst den Ehrengenosz / Then they are put in fenugreek"; in the “proverbs” by Sebastian Franck : “drumb you shouldn't get all heads into a fenugreek and force them”; at Geiler von Kaysersberg : “I'm not talking about a fenugreek”; with Martin Luther : "The whole world is frightened and over-rumbled until it is finally chased into a fenugreek" and in many other, all of them obscure and strange contexts of meaning.

It is probably due to the prevalence of Luther's texts that “to go under the horn ” has prevailed today, while verbs like “force” and “drive” no longer appear in this context.

Explanations from the history of language, meaning and usage

  • To chase a person at the horn of a goat. This is all the more intimidating when you combine the fenugreek with the devil's horn, which also suggests this origin.
  • The explanation that the meat / dough is pushed into a horn during sausage preparation or baking, although the step to today's meaning cannot be understood here.
  • Bockhorn translated "Bockstall": In Swabia there was probably for naughty students a "Bockstall", a kind of punishment cell .
  • There was once a scholar named Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn , who probably cornered many people with his incredible knowledge.
  • The legumes of the fenugreek have a very unpleasant odor.
  • In the Harz there is the "fenugreek" as a name for the Easter fire . On the other hand, there is an old version that calls itself “crawling into the fenugreek”, which speaks against this explanation. On the other hand: Easter / Paschafeuer = Paoskefüer (Low German). Thurn = tower of waste wood to be burned off (in the Elbmarschen the Easter fire is called "Easter Tower"). Paosk-Thorn → Paoksthorn → Bockshorn?
  • The judiciary, which at the time liked to force the guilty into a goat's skin shirt when they wanted to read him his register of sins or punished him by sewing the delinquent into a goat's skin and chasing him through the town. The “goatskin” was called “bockeshamo”, which later became “fenugreek”. This origin is not so unlikely, because the term also appears in the ship of fools .
  • Religious reference: The name of God was not mentioned in curses out of awe, but rather distorted into Box, Potz ("Potz-Blitz") or similar. God's wrath may have been spoken like boxing horn (Box-zorn / Botz-zorn), from which box horn later developed. Source for this origin: “Boxhorn should desecrate you, you fat square, quadrangular belly!” (“Katzipori” ( Michael Lindener ), 1588). The Teufel / Bock relation certainly contributed to the popularization of this curse.
  • A horn is an object that is wide at the front, then curved and narrower and narrower and completely closed at the back. In the late Middle Ages, the animals were hunted for big game in a specially made fencing open at one point, where they could then be killed (wall hanging deer hunt , Basel Historical Museum ).
  • A box is a horse stand. The word comes from volkslat. buxis , 'box made from boxwood'. To hunt in the box horn literally means 'to hunt in the horn box'. Perhaps narrowing wild-caught fences were called “boxing horns” in the language of the people, perhaps the farmers had also built such fences to catch runaway cattle. They were curved so that the cattle that had sprung up could not see the end of the fence. The word "boxhorn clover" may stand for the clover that grew in such a cattle enclosure for runaway cattle, the cattle box horn.

Rating

The fact is that none of the interpretations / origins mentioned can claim general validity, because this expression must be very old in its original form. This is because even at the time when the oldest evidence available to us comes from, the original meaning was no longer known. Only in this way could so many variations develop. Almost all of them agree that the fenugreek is not pleasant.

See also

Web links

Wiktionary: Fenugreek  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Wiktionary: to defeat  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Duden, dictionary of origin , 1963, p. 78