This is because ‘to hit’ can of course mean “to punch someone” in English, and then ‘ler’ is the present tense of the Norwegian word for “to laugh”. Put these words together and it made some amount of sense to me to imagine old “hit-laughs” as someone who hits people and then laughs at their pain, in other words a bully, a sadist, or otherwise a cruel villain.
Is this the thread where we post our dumb kid etymologies? Because oh boy, I’ve got one.
CW: SA
As a kid, I played a lot of Ogre Battle 64. One of the weapons in the game is called a rapier. I’d never heard of them before and wasn’t familiar with the word, but one day I happened to overhear some true crime thing my mom was watching on TV that involved rape. I also did not recognize this word, but I gleaned from context that it was a violent sex thing.
Aha! The light went off in my dumb kid brain. To rape someone meant to stab them in the junk, and a rapier was a sword designed specifically for doing so.
CW SA
Aaagh you just reminded me of my first time playing Scrabble. This was with my mom and I was a kid, and I played the word “rape”. I didn’t know what the word meant, but I had seen it somewhere or other, and I figured it was probably an appropriate word to play… Yeah, it went a bit awkwardly. I don’t know if I got to change my word after I was explained what it meant.
it’s also a perfectly common variety of cabbage grown for its oil rich seeds
I was playing Scrabble at my in-laws one weekend. Triumphantly played the word ‘glans’, which would have secured me the win.
Everyone told me it wasn’t a word and wouldn’t let me have it.
I’m still bitter about that.
Lol, thats cute and understandable in a kid-logic way.
In a similar vein, I thought Lou Bega was a communist revolutionary who later somehow pivoted to being a musician, like some sort of sellout Che, because he was included a pre-built playable dictator in Tropico 1.
Turns out he’s there because he wanted a game cameo in return for using “Mambo #5” in the credits screen.
I thought Espresso was called Expresso because it has lots of caffeine and so makes you go fast, like you’re in the express train.
I also thought the black market was like, a physical location you could buy illegal stuff.
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the spirit of the revolution will never die
※When I say “posthumously” I’m not sure if I actually believed that the guy was renamed to Hitler specifically after he died, but I am pretty sure that I did believe at the very least that “Hitler” was a name given to him by others when or after he started doing Nazi shit.
Who was the previous Hitler? Who will be the next one?
(apparently it was pretty inconsistent before Hitler, the stand-in for “great evil man”. Napoleon and Judas were pretty popular English ones, but nothing reached Hiterian levels of reputation)
Did anyone else hear the rumor growing up that Hitler and Eva Braun would Cleveland Steamer one another? I remember being totally grossed out by it as a kid much more at that though then like him murdering over a million Jews. This was in the 90’s in the USA.
Heard it was his cousin and a glass table, but yeah, Hitler being Shitler was up there with Manson getting ribs removed in terms of prevalence.
I think I’ve actually seen 3 different Hitler sexuality documentaries on the history channel, each one suggesting a very different sexuality (that each nonetheless was outside the norm).
What did they say? I’m morbidly curious.
One said that he was an extreme sexual sadist and was filled with lurid tales of his activities (and hinted at more), the sort of thing that pooping on Eva Braun would have been one of the more mentionable ones.
One said that he was completely asexual, and was in love with Germany, and only hung out with Eva (and eventually got married) to legitimise his appearance of being a German statesman.
One said he was extremely gay and had a lover that he maintained into The Great War.
In the light of current moral panics, I’m surprised there wasn’t one claiming he was secretly trans or something
Hitler and Eva Braun would Cleveland Steamer one another
i mean they are German
Wasn’t there an urban legend his real name was Shickelgruber?
His dad was born a Schicklgruber but changed his surname at age 39, apparently.
Also the only reason it’s spelled like that is becuase of inconsistent 19th century German spelling, it probably should have been ‘Hiedler’ or even ‘Huttler’
His father’s last name, but I think he should be named that…
When I was a kid I liked the band Gas Pump and their groovy electronic music, especially songs like “One More Time” and “Harder Better Faster Stronger”. I wondered why they had chosen such an unusual name.
