Even the godlike Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi is plagued by earthly weaknesses. For example, on Wednesday he missed a penalty in the World Cup match against Poland. In the sophisticated language of sports journalism, that means: Messi awarded the penalty. This brings us to a word that played a notable role in a village shop in Lower Bavaria a few hours before Messi’s missed shot. When the customers discussed the world situation in front of the checkout, an old farmer’s wife said: “I can never turn on the radio!” Her reasoning made sense: the Russian, that is, the Putin, scared her, she said, “the bastard, they should just forgive him.” Putin’s enemies should forgive him, she said, and the general store went quiet. But not everyone had understood what the good woman really meant.
Two young women, fresh from the forest run and about to recharge their batteries with a buttered pretzel, vented their anger after the woman who fears Putin left the store. “She’s crazy,” they complained, “first she scolds him, then she wants to forgive him.”
Every language has its pitfalls, especially the paths of the dialect can quickly lead astray. Now an elderly gentleman interjected that the woman had probably used the word forgive in a different sense, it could also mean to poison, he had known that since childhood. In fact, the dictionary reveals that forgiveness is not only used in the sense of mercy (“and forgive us our debts”), but is used here and there with malicious intent.
The latter probably also applied to the customer that Putin would most like to forgive. On the farms it used to be a constant task to forgive the rats and other vermin. This meaning is documented as early as 1801 in Adelung’s dictionary of High German dialect: “execute by poison.”
They had never heard that before, the joggers protested, shaped by the common belief that is already expressed in the folk song: “The Russ that’s coming, that’s for sure!” In the 19th century, the linguist Johann Andreas Schmeller also knew the word Russ as a synonym for “annoying flies that have made themselves at home in some places”. Even then, attempts were made to forgive these aggressors.