Not so much of a bonehead comment this time around as of a bonehead contraction …
I’ve written a couple of times about how the Germans like their laws and about how they like referring to their overly long names with sometimes rather cryptic abbreviations. Today, I discovered perhaps one of the most unfortunate abbreviations ever.
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The Maternity Protection Act here in Germany (Mutterschutzgesetz) is officially abbreviated as MuSchG. This is not only difficult to type, but also highly reminiscent of the German slang term for a certain part of a woman’s anatomy, namely Muschi. Interestingly enough, Muschi is also a popular name for female cats, drawing immediate parallels to the English word with which it sort of rhymes and which can also refer to either cats or, on about the same level of vulgarity, female anatomy. Even more interestingly, despite the same parallels between cats and anatomy also existing in French, only the German Muschi seems to have come upon its dual meaning from two different sources and not the one from cat going over into the anatomy.
As always, anyway …
The first, immediate question that arises is who came up with this? The only other German word my Langenscheid returns as starting with “musch” is Muschel (mussel), so it’s not as if my mind is in the gutter. There are very few linguistic associations that can otherwise be made here.
The second question is why no one else has ever noticed. But then here at the University of Not-Bielefeld, it literally took them years to notice that they shouldn’t derive the acronym to their open-house day for high-school students from all the major words of its German name, Schulischer Hochschulinformationstag, otherwise it turns into a SHIT event. (Thanks to my eldest daughter for pointing this one out to me.)
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