I recently ran across the Dutch term kater ‘hangover’ and was curious enough to look it up; Wiktionary told a story interesting enough to pass on:
From German Kater (“tomcat; hangover”), a humorous alteration of Katarrh (“catarrh, mucosal inflammation”, loosely also “malaise”) based on somewhat older German Katzenjammer (“hangover”, literally “caterwaul”). An influence by a brand of beer called Kater is also often cited, though this is doubtful.
Doubtful indeed, but I like the “humorous alteration of Katarrh” origin. Hangover terms must include a wide range of odd etymologies.
Interesting! In Slovenian it’s “maček” which is literally a translation of the German one, though with the more broad meaning of “cat”. Here’s what their etymological dictionary says ( https://fran.si/193/marko-snoj-slovenski-etimoloski-slovar/4288522/macek?View=1&Query=ma%c4%8dek ),
>”Dobesedni prevod nem. Kater, kar pomeni ‛žival maček’ in ‛slabo počutje po prepiti noči’. To sta izvorno dve različni besedi. Nem. Kater v pomenu ‛slabo počutje po prepiti noči’ je nastalo v 19. stol. med leipziškimi študenti iz narečne različice besede, ki ustreza knjiž. nem. Katarrh ‛hud prehlad’ (Kl, 361). Beseda, ki je le enakozvočnica nem. Kater ‛žival maček’ (to je sorodno z angl. cat, rus. kót ‛žival maček’) in ki je z njo povezana le ljudskoetimološko, je bila v sloven. prevedena, kot da bi bilo nem. Kater ena beseda z dvema pomenoma.”
It clarifies the German “Kater” as having “originated in the 19th century among Leipzig students, derived from a dialect version of the word corresponding to the standard German Katarrh meaning “severe cold”.
Seems somewhat oddly specific with the mention of Leipzig students…
It does indeed! Thanks for that.
Not much else is mentioned here at a glance, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t link it: https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/kater2
Paul’s Deutsches Wörterbuch (9th ed., 1992) is somewhat dubious about the derivation from Katarrh (and none of the dictionaries I own mentions what the Leipzig pronunciation of Katarrh actually was – and my question is: why would students in Leipzig, coming from all over Germany, use a local Leipzig pronunciation?)
Kater would be a logical way of mispronouncing such a foreign word for the majority of Dutch and German speakers, wouldn’t it? That is, KA-ter instead of ka-TAR. Anything that would make it specific to Leipzig (different a-sounds? different r-sounds?) doesn’t seem relevant to that point.
That’s where “humorous alteration” comes in. The students were perfectly competent Latinists, they were just having fun.
Katzenjammer was still used, memorably, in 1865.
I like “Haarweh”, too.
As far as German is concerned, I do not find this to be a “logical way of mispronouncing a foreign word”. Catarrh was commonly used in German since the 16th century (basically the equivalent of modern Schnupfen). And Kater apparently was originally part of the slang of Leipzig or Jena students in the mid 19th century — i.e. highly educated men (they were all men) who knew Latin and Greek and were proud of that. The editors of Paul’s dictionary prefer the derivation from Katzenjammer, and I think I agree. Catarrh is not needed to explain Kater. We should apply Occam’s razor and discard the Catarrh hypothesis.
Occasionally, you still find people using Katzenjammer. It’s rarer than the ubiquitous Kater, but it hasn’t died out.
And Kater apparently was originally part of the slang of Leipzig or Jena students in the mid 19th century — i.e. highly educated men (they were all men) who knew Latin and Greek and were proud of that.
As DM points out, highly educated students like to have fun with language.
@url Let me put it another way: this is how we twentieth and twenty-first century people[1] (still) humorously mispronounce things on purpose once in a while, perhaps especially in environments like student organizations. For example file (document) and file (traffic jam). “Let me look that up in the traffic jam” kind of humor. The only difference is this example is based on spelling and the other one on pronunciation. My point is simply that it feels like an incredibly obvious joke.
[1] For some value of we.
Kluge’s treatment in his Deutsche Studentensprache (1895) here, p. 98, and then his later reconsideration in his Wortforschung und Wortgeschichte: Aufsätze zum deutschen Sprachsatz (1912) here, p. 100–102.
(Note also what is collected under Kater in Max Höfler, Deutsches Krankheitsnamen-Buch (1899) here, p. 261.)
I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if told that a certain word came from a deliberate mispronunciation by Oxford or Cambridge students.
(German students may have been too busy playing with swords to play with words, however.)
cf. cagne > khâgne
For example file (document) and file (traffic jam).
I’m not following. What would that be in German? I can’t think of a word for file that is spelled like “stau”. Or is there a register of English where “file” is a synonym for “traffic jam”.
I think ‘file’ means ‘queue’ in some kinds of English (as in ‘single file’ or ‘filing into a building’, but it only works in those phrases for me). I’ve never heard it specifically for a traffic jam, though.
I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if told that a certain word came from a deliberate mispronunciation by Oxford or Cambridge students
“Rugger” springs to mind. I also have before me a copy of that disappointingly backsliding rightwing mag the New Staggers. (Bloody Fabians, the lot of them.)
Matriculash (an excuse to drink throughout the day and briefly forget about the workload for the next three years).
https://www.thatoxfordgirl.com/post/2018/11/06/a-brief-guide-to-oxford-jargon
Not all deliberate mispronunciations are varsitogenetic. Where did “coinkydink” spring from? I feel that there should be an early-20th-century popular entertainer to blame. Redditors have traced it as far back as 1927. Early radio, perhaps?
Soccer, quite regularly derived from Assoc. football.
FTW.
@Vanya
Apologies for not specifying. That’s in Dutch since I couldn’t think of any examples in German off the top of my head, but the basic joke might also work in French, Italian, and Spanish (en file / en fila).
Concretely, /ˈfilə/ is a French loanword meaning traffic jam (i.e., a specialized meaning of queue or line), while /faɪl/ is an English loanword for an electronic document. The spelling is identical.
So looking it up “in a traffic jam” would convey how slow and boring the process will be.
It’s in a somewhat similar genre as coinkydink mentioned above. Another example of a Dutch joke pronunciation, which unlike the other one I don’t fully understand, is to say tenks, as in thanks. It’s a spelling pronunciation, since a natural Dutch pronunciation would be fenks, but I don’t quite understand the humor in that one. It’s supposed to be whimsical. It signals something like “haha, look how I’m mispronouncing this word to add a laugh and a smile to saying thanks. :-)”
Mercy buckets, Frans.
Katzenjammer is definitely old-fashioned, I wouldn’t even expect it to be commonly understood … except, of course, when referring to the early Kyuss … :^>
Kater for hangover is in common use, but I’d say even more frequent is verkatert (sein). Katerfrühstück deserves to be mentioned here as well.
A Dutch synonym for kater in the sense of ‘hangover’ is haarpijn.
Source:
https://synoniemen.net/index.php?zoekterm=kater
At a quick glance, I don’t see any attestations of haarpijn in the intended sense after ca. 1960. More recent attestations either seem to talk about how it’s a word with that meaning, as opposed to simply using it, or to be using it to talk about actual pain where hairs grow (trichodynia).
The WNT entry from 1897 says:
Students are also accused of coming up with katterigheid.
Czech has kocovina for ‘hangover’: ~”cat-stuff”; Rejzek in his etymological dictionary links it secondarily in the late-19th century to Katzenjammer and Kater/Katarrh as above, but interestingly prepends that with (translation mine): “Originally this word meant ‘catcalls(/heckling/rioting)’ (a jocular alternation of kočičina (‘caterwauling’) after the Mladá Boleslav hetman Kotze, a target of rioting during the 1848 revolution)”, citing two additionally-Czech-language works from the 50s and 60s that I don’t have access to.
My Stručný etymologický slovník jazyka českého (1967) mentions Kotze, Katzenjammer, and Kater/Katarrh but not kočičina.
If anyone doubts that words arising at schools may spread elsewhere, see, for example,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_%22-er%22.
@frans my (Dutch) feeling would be: this tenks I’m extending to you is so informal, that I’m not going to bother to pronounce this pretentious voiceless dental fricative from across the pond
see, for example, Oxford “-er”
Or San Rafael High School, fons et origo 420.
Kotze? That’s interesting. It’s now a feminine noun meaning “puke”; the verb, i.e. what you do when you’re badly hungover, is kotzen.
Speaking of Czech… supposedly, another term for having a hangover is or was einen sitzen haben. You have a what sitting (on your head perhaps)? A monkey. Why a monkey? Czech opice, pun on opít se “get drunk”.
Having a monkey on one’s head in Czech is evidently a more transient source of distress than having a https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monkey_on_one%27s_back in AmEng.
Am I showing my age when I wonder why no one has mentioned The Katzenjammer Kids?
In related news: Kotzebue has nothing to do with the current meaning of Kotze, as far as I can find out. I used to wonder about Kotzebue, in particular whether it was pronounced with a closed “o” like the Austrian Kotzen = coarsely woven woolen coat. Seems it is.
Der Ort, welcher der Familie den Namen gab, ist das Dorf Kossebau, auch Kossebue und Kotzebue genannt, bei Arendsee in der Altmark.
@Rodger C: Am I showing my age when I wonder why no one has mentioned The Katzenjammer Kids?
I bet you know who Major Hoople is.
supposedly, another term for having a hangover is or was einen sitzen haben.
Still is in Cologne and environs.
In the varieties I know, that expression is actually used for the state before the hangover.
@J.W. Brewer: There is a great scene between Lt. Fancy and Det. Sipowicz in the first season of NYPD Blue, the characters who have the most interesting relationship in the show’s early days. The dialogue ran approximately:
@Hans: In the varieties I know, that expression is actually used for the state before the hangover.
That’s what I meant to say – I got carried away by my impression that DM didn’t know the expression einen sitzen haben at all, and I forgot the context. I’ve only heard that used to say “is drunk” – never “has a hangover”.
Good to know. The only drinking people I hang out with speak English, or Polish sometimes…
Well, that’s a dialect thing. Bavarian-Austrian dialects don’t have an open one. I wouldn’t carry that over into Standard German, where every short o is automatically open.
>> Am I showing my age when I wonder why no one has mentioned The Katzenjammer Kids?
Old age is not required to remember the Katzenjammer Kids, they are still syndicated to a few dozen newspapers on a weekly basis as “the longest-running strip in history,” here’s the latest installment.
The Katzenjammer Kids are from before my time, but so are Shakespeare and the Bible.
I also think “Catarrh” being involved might be a bit of a stretch, just based on gut feeling, but I dunno.
Here’s a dad joke I came across on the topic:
Warum trinken Mäuse keinen Alkohol? Weil sie Angst vorm Kater haben.
Warum ziehen sich Mäuse im Winter warm an? Weil sie Angst vorm Katarrh haben.
Intensiver Alkoholkonsum kann eine katarrhtische Wirkung haben.