Straw widower
Straw widowers and straw widowers are names for partners living in a marriage or relationship who temporarily live alone, that is, " widowers ". Such a situation typically arises during trips that are not taken together. The relationship continues, a continuation of everyday life can be expected.
There is no convention on how long the relationship partner has to live single to be called a straw widower. A separation of just one day is just as conceivable as a period of several months.
Origin of the term
The origin and the development of the terms straw widower and straw widow are not clearly clarified; there are different ways of deriving it.
In Chemnitz there are records of girls known as strobrute (straw bride) in 1399 , who are expecting a child before the wedding. As a punishment, they have to be married with a straw wreath on their heads after the boys put straw men in front of their windows at night.
In addition to straw , grass can also be found as a prefix, especially in Low German and also in the English language, there as grass widow (er) .
In the Baroque era , the straw widow is referred to in the Amaranthes women's room lexicon (Leipzig 1715) as an only apparent widow whose husband is away or absent. According to the Teutsch-Englischer Lexikon von Ludwig (Leipzig 1716), a straw widower is in the appropriate sense "a husband whose wife is in the straw, or whose wife lies in" (a husband whose wife is or is lying in the straw). The English grasswidower and Swedish gräsänkling are more recent deviations from these names.
In Goethe's Faust I the image of the straw is applied to a wife left behind: There Marthe complains about her husband. He goes straight into the world / And leaves me alone on the straw. Straw obviously stands for bed here . So straw widow (r) can be explained as a term for a partner who is in a relationship but who spends the night alone - instead of in a shared double bed - who is single on the straw, i.e. in bed.
According to another view, the term comes from an analogy from the 14th century. Accordingly, the paraphrase "apparent bride", mhd. Strôbrût , was used for an unmarried mother, as grasswedewe also for a girl who was seduced on the grass. Since her moment lover has left her again, she has been made a widow.
Another interpretation sees the origin in agriculture from the 16th to 17th centuries. At that time, troops of young men traveled through the country who hired themselves out as farm workers on large estates in the summer. They often helped with sickling and mowing grain . The wives of these men, who were waiting in their home villages for their husbands to return, were commonly referred to as "straw widows".
See also
literature
- Friedrich Kluge : Etymological dictionary of the German language 19th edition edited by Walther Mitzka , Walter de Gruyter & Co Berlin 30 1963, there: Straw widow p. 758 f.
- Lutz Mackensen : Origin of Words. Etymological dictionary of the German language. Vma-Vertriebsgesellschaft, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-928127-47-0 .
- Kurt Krüger-Lorenzen German idioms and what's behind them. Munich, Heyne 2001, ISBN 3-453-18838-1 .
