Language desk
< May 20	<< Apr \| May \| Jun >>	May 22 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

May 21[edit]

No Laughing Matter[edit]

Mark Twain is often said to have observed or written: "A German joke is no laughing matter." I have not been able to find a source for this quote. Did he really say this, or is it just another apocryphal aphorism associated with him? --Danzw (talk) 11:37, 21 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It certainly sounds like something he might say, but Google doesn't seem to show a specific source other than Twain in some general way. Newspapers.com (a pay site, and not comprehensive) first shows this exact quote in a 1958 article in the Guardian, in a review of a book called The Comic Tradition in America by Kenneth S. Lynn. It states that exact sentence, and puts it in quotes, but does not attribute the quote. That is, it's uncertain if the reviewer quoted it from somewhere, or if it's a line from the book. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:42, 21 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The famous Twain essay on German is called "The Awful German Language", and it can be found here: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html . The quote you are discussing does not appear there, nor do the words "joke" or "laugh". Nor does it appear in "The Innocents Abroad" (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3176). This doesn't mean that he didn't say it elsewhere, but it rules out two obvious suspects. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.107.80.170 (talk) 15:45, 21 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Bob Newhart once said on a talk show that it's hard to do humor in Germany because Germans take everything so literally. Such as, "Vhy vould you call zis man 'Curly' vhen he has no hair at all?"[1] (about 4 minutes in) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:40, 21 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You may be interested in Why people think Germans aren't funny from BBC Travel. Alansplodge (talk) 11:46, 23 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

retronym[edit]

A changed/new name for an already named existing concept is a retronym. What is a new name for a concept/thing that already existed but was nameless? Thylacoop5 (talk) 11:43, 21 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

We have a sniglet article (though obviously not a linguistic term)... -- AnonMoos (talk) 12:33, 21 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Neologism. --Jayron 32 15:28, 21 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

That's a new word or expression, but not necessarily for something that was previously nameless. For example, people were hijacking airplanes before the 1960s, but "hijacking an airplane" is what they would have called it, not the neologism skyjacking. --76.69.47.55 (talk) 02:23, 22 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

In large parts of the English speaking world they would have called it "hijacking an aeroplane", rather than an airplane, but your broader point is valid. HiLo48 (talk) 03:24, 22 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Well, if they don't even know what an airplane is called, I don't see why they should count! :-) --76.69.47.55 (talk) 04:23, 22 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"Hijacking an airplane" is not a name for the concept, though. It's a description of the thing which was happening, and for which there was no name. There was, at the time, no word which meant "hijacking an airplane". A new name was created for a thing which existed, but was until that point nameless. That's a neologism. --Jayron 32 14:09, 23 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]