too funny

[winterbadger]

There's a pretty regular mistake that people who don't speak German make when writing about historical German military units. For whatever reason, they refer to sovereigns' bodyguards as "lieb guard" units.

"Lieb" of course means "love"; what they really mean are "leib guard" (bodyguard) units. But it happens all the time, along with people who think "Peninsular" is a noun and have trouble with French words like "chausseur" and "voltigeur".

But what I saw just now was priceless. One person in a thread referred to the "Lieb Guard" and I thought, "Oh, here we go..." And then someone replied, correctly referring to the "Leib...


....Gaurd". Aiiiieeeee!

:-)

(Of course, almost no one goes so far as to correctly refer to such units as "Leib Garde". Now that would just be crazy...

Comments

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Ooh.. I was about to comment that peninsular can be a noun as well, and then I googled and realised the one has an r and t'other doesn't, and I don't think I ever noticed that before, when thinking about places like the Gower Peninsula (no R, drattit) in Wales.

[winterbadger]

There's a tendency for a lot of wargamers to refer to the Peninsular War as "the Peninsular" which makes me grind my teeth.

It doesn't help that it is becoming common in government circles to refer to meetings at the ministerial level as "ministerials". Gah.

[balzacq.livejournal.com]

I haven't done a post on Norwescon just passed, but you'll be amused to know that I got dragooned (deliberate word choice) into a costuming panel on Napoleonic Military Uniforms. Apparently the panelist who actually knew anything about the history bailed from the con the day before, and the person in charge of the costuming panel track knew I was a wargamer *and* costumer, so...

I talked about French history from Republic to Empire, the overall trend toward standardized uniforms, the difference between dress uniform and campaign uniform, how the uniforms of the day evolved from 18th-century uniform and trends in civilian clothing, and why all the braids and tall hats had functional purpose as well as decorational.

The other panelists talked about where to get patterns. :-)

Except for the one panelist who wanted to talk about the Imperial Guard Mameluk regiment to the exclusion of all else. Sigh.


(Oh, and I made a point of mentioning those two Russian Hussar regiments that wore lemon yellow and flamingo pink.)

[winterbadger]

And then there were the Soum and Pavlograd in turquoise! :-) Napoleonic armies would make even Sebastien Horsely happy...

I'm glad that all that poring over wargaming tomes comes in useful from time to time. It's funny, whenever I'm acknowledging that someone else's knowledge of minutiae is a bit obscure, I think of the space in my brain that's being taken up with the significant differences between the different regiments of the Garde Imperiale of the First and Second Empires (plus the awareness of how different they probably looked after sleeping rough for a week out of barracks...)

Did you talk about the importance of ridiculously huge cravats in la Directoire? :-)

[blueingenue.livejournal.com]

It sounds intentional sarcasm a la "I'm going to see if you try to correct me without realizing I just corrected you on something else."