This week's pick is a nautical term courtesy of my colleague Judith Schächterle. A sailing boat's centerboard is called Schwert in German, and this has been taken over by the Russians as шверт ("shvert"). Correspondingly, a Schwertboot (a boat with a centerboard, a dinghy) is called швертбот ("shvertbot") in Russian.

The image is from www.pioneership.narod.ru.

For some reason, a nice memory from when I was studying in Heidelberg popped into my head today: I once encountered a man playing the bagpipe in the middle of a field outside of the city. Funny enough, the German term for bagpipe, Dudelsack, is also among those that have migrated to other languages, so I decided to give it pride of place on my blog today. In Dutch, the bagpipe is called doedelzak and is pronounced almost exactly like the German original - it's just the "l" that is a little bit different.

The image is from www.uitvaartdoedelzakspeler.nl.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY FROM AUSPUFF TO ZEITGEIST - MY BLOG HAS BEEN AROUND FOR A YEAR NOW! THANK YOU FOR FOLLOWING ME!

This week's Word of the Week has a very intriguing history. A Prügelknabe is the German version of a whipping boy, a position that was introduced at the English court a few centuries ago. Whipping boys were boys who grew up and were educated with princes and were punished for the failings of their royal companions. This was because no one but the king had the right to punish a prince, and the king was often absent. This form of discipline worked because the princes often developed a close relationship with their whipping boy, making it hard for them to witness the punishment that they should have undergone themselves. Click here for more background information.

Today, Prügelknabe is mainly used as a synonym for scapegoat. The same is true for prygelknabe, which is the form Prügelknabe takes in Danish and Norwegian. 

The image is from www.gucca.dk.

I suppose I'm a hausfrau myself right now, what with my baby daughter only being eight weeks old. But I prefer the neutral English definition of hausfrau - a (German) housewife - to the more informal one, "a woman regarded as overly domesticated or efficient" (Oxford Dictionary). However, my impression is that the word is far more often used in a demeaning rather than a neutral way. Hausfrau is a term from US English, by the way. And I think you'd be surprised at the number of hausfrau-themed blogs out there on the Web, most of them trying to be at least a little ironic about the term.

The image is from glamoroushausfrau.blogspot.com.