Egg dance

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Pieter Aertsen , The Egg Dance (1552)

Nowadays, the word egg dance is mostly used in the phrase "to perform an egg dance", which means something like proceeding very carefully and / or in a complicated manner in order to solve something (e.g. "to the bush", to a problem etc.) ) talk around, avoid the gist of something, avoid it. The Duden defines egg dance as colloquial for "very careful, winding behavior, tacting in a delicate situation", originally an "artful dance between laid eggs".

Concept history

The first evidence of the word can be found in 1795 in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters apprenticeship , in which Mignon dances blindfolded between eggs laid on the floor. Pierer's Universal Lexikon from 1858 describes this dance as an “artistic achievement by tightrope walkers a. similar artists by dancing blindfolded between eggs laid at a distance, or even after they have moved them with their feet, performing grotesque dances without touching one of them. "

At the moment, similar terms such as "messing around" and "messing around" are often used, which means wriggling around or inconsistent tactics in difficult, complex situations. According to the Bloomberg news agency, the expression German Eiertanz was incorporated into the English vocabulary in 2011 as a loan word to describe Germany's hesitant attitude towards the euro crisis .

literature

Dictionary and lexical articles

  • Volume 5: Des – Ekk , in: Meyers Lexikonredaktion, head: Annette Zwahr: Meyers Großes Taschenlexikon. in 25 volumes, with CD-ROM, 8th edition, BI-Taschenbuchverlag, Mannheim / Leipzig / Vienna / Zurich 2001, ISBN 3-411-11058-9 .
  • Egg dance. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 7 : Ordinary – Glaive - (IV, 1st section, part 4). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1949, Sp. 356 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
  • Friedrich Kluge : Etymological dictionary of the German language. Edited by Elmar Seebold, 25th edition. de Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2011, p. 208, ISBN 978-3-11-022364-4 .
  • Heinz Küpper : Dictionary of German colloquial language. 1st edition, 6th reprint, Stuttgart 1997, p. 194
  • Lutz Röhrich: Lexicon of proverbial sayings. Volume 2, 4th edition, Freiburg 1999, pp. 361-363.

Secondary literature

  • Hans von der Au : The folk dance in Alsace. In: Oberdeutsche Zeitschrift für Volkskunde. 15th year, issue 1/3 1941, pp. 14-25 (on the "Eiertanz" p. 23).
    • To the egg dance . In: The German folk song. 45/1943, p. 14 f.
  • Ludwig Göhring: Popular idioms and expressions. Interpretation of unexplained, incompletely or even incorrectly explained popular sayings and expressions. Munich 1937, p. 145 (No. 266 “How to walk on needles”).
  • Karl M. Klier: The egg dance . In: Deutsche Volkskunde, 2nd year, 2nd issue, 1940, pp. 86–89.
  • Otto Ladendorf: Keyword Studies. In: Journal for German Education. 24/1910, pp. 473–481 (“Eiertanz” on p. 475).
  • L. Schmidt: The egg dance and its execution. In: folk song - folk dance - folk music. 48, Vienna 1947, pp. 26-28.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eiertanz on duden.de, accessed on September 27, 2011.
  2. ↑ Egg dance . In: Universal Lexicon of the Present and Past . 4., reworked. and greatly increased edition, Volume 5:  Germany – Euromos , Eigenverlag, Altenburg 1858, p.  533 .
  3. ↑ “German Eiertanz” moves into English. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . September 27, 2011.