Frippery
With frippery (from Old French virelai , dance song ' Middle High German virlei , late Middle High German firlifanz name for a funny jumping dance) refers to a silly posturing or unnecessary things.
Originally it meant a fun and fast jumping dance or a funny, silly person. Adelung writes in his grammatical-critical dictionary of High German dialect from 1796:
“Die Frlefanzerēy, plur. die -en: silly antics, unreasonable quick ideas, silly excuses, in common speech styles; almost like alefanzerey. Even the simpler frills, plur. inus. sometimes occurs in the meaning just given. [...] Luther names a fripper who dreams around with words. [...] "
Today, the word colloquially means derogatory as much as trinket , worthless (fashionable) stuff, but also silliness, folly , childishness. Frippery is also a synonym for meaningless, insignificant information and superfluous decoration.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Knaur German Dictionary , Lexigrafisches Institute Munich, 1985, page 374
- ^ Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander : German Sprichwort Lexikon. Volume 1, 1867, columns 1027-1028. online at zeno.org
- ↑ Meyer's Großes Konversations-Lexikon, Volume 6. Leipzig 1906, p. 596. here online at zeno.org
- ↑ Firlefanz in duden.de, accessed on October 14, 2012
- ↑ Johann Christoph Adelung : Grammatical-critical dictionary of the High German dialect. Volume 2, Leipzig 1796, pp. 164-165. here online at zeno.org
