Milkmaid bill
Milkmaid calculation is the mocking term for a naive consideration or argumentation that ignores essential aspects and comes to a plausible, but actually inaccurate result. The Swiss term milk book accounting can have the same meaning, but it can also stand for a simple type of accounting.
Definition and theories of origin
According to the Duden , the term “milkmaid bill ” refers to a bill based on fallacies or illusions. The term goes back to the fable The Milk Woman and the Milk Can (La Laitière et le Pot au Lait) by Jean de La Fontaine . It tells the story of a milkmaid who, on the way to the market, imagines what she can buy with the proceeds for the milk - and in turn from the profit from what she has acquired and so on - but in the end unexpectedly spills the milk.
"On her head [the maid] Perrette carries a jug full of milk [...] she stares at the happiness that has been poured out."
Another explanation refers to the finger math of milkmaids at the C. Bolle dairy in Berlin, who also cashed and performed their arithmetic operations with the fingers of both hands. In this way, at least the milkmaid Anna Schnasing is said to have calculated the price for the milk she delivered.
literature
- Dietmar Bartz: The results of the milkmaid calculations . In: Business from A to Z . Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 305-307 .
- Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim: The milk woman. In: Project Gutenberg-DE . Retrieved January 15, 2020 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Milkmaid bill . In: Duden, German Universal Dictionary , 6th edition, Bibliographisches Institut (Dudenverlag), Mannheim 2006, ISBN 3-411-05506-5
- ↑ Milkmaid bill . Duden
- ↑ La Fontaine: The Fables . 1st edition. Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1964
- ↑ Herbert Cerutti: milk maid bill. In: NZZ Folio. May 1999, accessed February 24, 2020 .