rogue
Crook is a word that has been attested since the 16th century for “cheater” or “ rascal ”. It describes people who operate fraud and theft on a commercial basis, often also organized , whereby they use secret identifiers and a special language ( crooks language ).
Following on from his fundamental work Community and Society , Ferdinand Tönnies distinguished two “ normal types ” of criminals in his criminal- sociological writings : the crook harms society, while the wrongdoer harms the community (e.g. murder out of jealousy ).
etymology
The word "crook" was derived from the Red Welsch word Joner or Jauner for "card game" (in the card game), which probably goes back to Yiddish jōwōn , "Greece" ( Ionia ). This is possibly an allusion to the Greeks who became homeless as a result of the Turkish wars : in French, grec is a comparable word for cardsharps.
history
In the 18th century, poverty was often a reason for people to join rascals. One example was the Duchy of Württemberg . The writer Gustav Schwab described how many destitute people lived there in the forests and caves of the Swabian Alb and demanded flour, milk and lard from the individual farms in the vicinity. If the farmers refused to comply, the crooks threatened arson.
Around 1800 there were around 3,000 of these people in Württemberg. To contain the problem, the crooks were caught and hanged. Other countries, on the other hand, did not act so severely against rascals. After their arrest, they were sold there for labor service in Italy. The children of the crooks were separated from their parents beforehand and placed in orphanages.
In Meyer's Konversationslexikon from 1888 it says about crooks: “In the first decade of the 19th century, during the war needs, especially in the border countries on the banks of the Rhine, the evil (crooks) increased to an unbearable level. The crooks did not form closed gangs, but only occasionally united in pranks that were to be carried out together and, whether the attack had succeeded or not, would soon disperse in all directions again. A more recent name for a type of crook is peasant catcher ; it is understood to mean those who tempt inexperienced people to gamble and thereby cheat. "
See also
literature
- Friedrich Christian Avé-Lallemant : The German crook in its socio-political, literary and linguistic training . Leipzig 1858–1862, 4 volumes.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Duden online: Gauner
- ↑ Gustav Schwab: The Neckar side of the Swabian Alb . Stuttgart 1823, page 171.
- ↑ Jürgen Kaiser: Why Swabians can do everything - if they want. Historical forays into Swabia . Evangelical Community Press, 2005, ISBN 978-3-920207-12-4 , page 17.