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by nsajko 761 days ago
Fun fact: that's actually a Yiddish word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frajer

English translation: dope, sucker. As in there's a sucker born every minute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
4 comments
eigenket 761 days ago
Fun fact: according to the etymology I could find online it's actually originally a German word (meaning client of a prostitute) that was borrowed by Yiddish, then borrowed in turn by Polish from Yiddish and also ended up in a couple of other European languages.
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tokai 761 days ago
Yiddish is a German language.
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eigenket 761 days ago
Not exclusively. It has elements from Hebrew and Aramaic (of course) as well as from various Slavic languages. A big chunk of it derives from High German but not all.
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gumby 761 days ago
What tokai said was OK: English is also classified as a Germanic language even though it includes a lot of French words, not to mention Hindi etc.

For that matter, a German word like „Dolmetsch“ doesn’t make German a Turkic language.

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eigenket 761 days ago
I think calling something a Germanic language is a bit different to calling it a German language.

I completely agree with your point about a "Germanic language" but I disagree about "a German language".

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tokai 759 days ago
It developed from High German with elements of Aramaic and Hebrew, in the area we would now call west Germany. The only way it's not a German language is if you deny the historic and linguistic roots of the language.
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phreeza 761 days ago
Similar word also exists in standard German, where it originally meant "f*cker" but now just means a man who buys services from a prostitute.
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rurban 761 days ago
Freier is not F*cker, just someone who needs to pay for sex, and is more independent then
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phreeza 761 days ago
No it more likely comes from archaic "freien", which still is used for "to marry" but used to mean something slightly different ;)
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fransje26 761 days ago
They still use a variant of that word in Dutch: vrijen. With the old meaning.. ;)
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actionfromafar 761 days ago
The even older meaning is "courter".
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verisimi 761 days ago
Also, 'chutzpah' which has a sense of being proud of trying to get away with it, unashamed.
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alex-korr 761 days ago
The word is widely used in Russian as well.
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