Bungler

A Tinker ( colloquially also Stümperer ) was loud Grimm's Deutsches dictionary originally a "pitiful, untüchtige" person. Their ineffectiveness was based on an impairment, a mutilation , because the oldest meaning of the etymologically related word blunt is "mutilated".

The term appeared early in the figurative meaning of “poor, in bad circumstances” (Grimm), as a quote from Valentin Triller's a little Silesian singing book (1555) shows:

"So I have
to dare to live my life, on Christ's word,
otherwise I will be a bungler there, to
endure great poverty forever"

The current use of the adjective stümperhaft and the verb (rum) stümpern is derived from further developments: The stümpler was a craftsman who worked on the (valuable) material with blunt tools , i.e. inadequately, and thus mostly screwed it up . This was often said of those craftsmen who withdrew from the guilds . According to Röhrich, these bunglers were "threatened with fines, confiscation of work and tools, mainly because they undercut the prices". Today's contemptuous use, especially in the figurative sense, as a dilettante , as a “non-master”, “who tries to do something that he does not understand and control”, is therefore obvious.

An early novel by Patricia Highsmith (1954) is entitled Der Stümper ( English The Blunderer ).

literature

• Bungler. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 20 : Strom – Szische - (X, 4th section). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1942, Sp. 420 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
• Franz Freiherr von Lipperheide (Hrsg.): Spruchwörterbuch . Haude & Spener Verlag, Berlin 1907 ff.
• Friedrich Kluge : Etymological dictionary of the German language . Walter de Gruyter Verlag, Berlin. 20th edition 1967 and 23rd exp. Edition 1995.
• Lutz Röhrich : Lexicon of proverbial sayings . Herder Verlag, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-451-04400-5

Web links

Wiktionary: Stümper  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} bungler. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 20 : Strom – Szische - (X, 4th section). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1942, Sp. 420 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
2. ↑ Quoted from: Stümper. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 20 : Strom – Szische - (X, 4th section). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1942, Sp. 420 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
3. ↑ Lutz Röhrich: Lexicon of the proverbial sayings . Herder Verlag, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1994, p. 1583
4. ↑ Lutz Röhrich: Lexicon of the proverbial sayings . Herder Verlag, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1994, p. 1583
5. ^ German new translation: Diogenes Verlag, Zurich 2005