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.