http://dict.leo.org/?lang=en

--Anon

You've got to be kidding! I'm just sorry I can't help -- I only know lösung (answer, solution -- including the NaCl dissolved in water type of solution) and have never seen it without an umlaut. I am more used to schlüssel, "key", for "password".

What the hell is a "fewmet"?

Losung is also (not very often) used for something roughly like a motto or slogan. It is not used for password, except in the military (when a guard says to you "Die Losung!" you better know it). Don't know about the scripture meaning.

Its meaning does not overlap with "Lf6sung" (solution, as in a riddle or a chemical) as far as I know.

Alas, my German is confined to about half a dozen words of politeness, so I cannot help Teresa. Wish I could.

Yes, Losung means both 'password' (also 'battle cry') and 'droppings (of a wild animal), fewmets.' Haven't seen the scriptural use. Um, why do you ask, if it isn't a secret?

There does not seem to be a meaning of "Losung" that translates as "scriptural text". The best authority here is probably Das Deutsche Wf6rterbuch von Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm, which is close in scope and extent to the full OED.

A note on "Lf6sung" vs. "Losung": Germans simply do not ever transcribe umlauts by dropping the umlaut marks. The correct transliteration of "e4" is "ae"; that of "f6" is "oe"; that of "fc" is "ue"; and that of "df" is "ss". Umlauts and "df" are ligatures. They are transliterated by breaking them down into their components, not by dropping one of the components. So "Lf6sung" would be written "Loesung". (It would also be "ueber", not "uber". Sorry, pet peeve.) However, in this special case it just so happens that Grimm's Wf6rterbuch denotes "Losung" as an archaic form of "Lf6sung". It probably shouldn't be used this way in a modern text, but could likely be found in texts prior to standardization of the German language.

I went looking for a better translation, but soon found myself helplessly enmired. When you're looking for fewmets, passwords, and religious texts, and are learning that losung is the stem of the German words for "assignment" and "lottery", you know you're out of your depth.

The only term from this I can unhesitatingly translate is Wolpertingerjagd: snipe hunt. It involves a candle or flashlight, a potato bag, a stick to hold the bag open, and a long nighttime vigil in the forest.

When you click on 'Watchword for today', you get 'Losung for '.

So it seems it does have the meaning of 'spiritual text', at least within the context of the Moravian Church.

Click on Herrnhut on the left to get the history of the Moravian Church and Losung.

Andrew, I would have thought it would be to keep all the basses and baritones together on one side and the sopranos and altos on the other, the better to sing hymns of praise on the day.

My mother once had a funny dream about funeral plots being accidentally oversubscribed and their arrangements muddled, which led to everyone having to go lie down on their assigned spots so they could figure out whether there was room for everyone. While Mother and her presumed neighbors in the hereafter were thus lying around on the grass, someone suggested that since they'd all be rising together on Judgement Day, they might want to settle on a hymn to sing, and maybe take this as an opportunity to rehearse it a little. Unfortunately, she woke up before they'd settled on a hymn.

Kellie, our local version didn't involve getting scared, but you were supposed to sit there banging two rocks together and singing for as long as it took you to wise up. I never fell for it. I attribute this, not to my superior social insight (which I didn't have), but to knowing that snipe were exceedingly unlikely to turn up in that area.

Zvi, thank you for losungen and the Moravian connection. Turns out their losungs are little pairs of scriptures, one each Old and New Testament, taken one pair per day like spiritual vitamins. Also turns out that this spiritual discipline has been computerized, and has spread to non-Moravians.

Reimer, thanks for the solid knowledge of German. Those would be the same Brothers Grimm we know from the folktale collections, yes?

LanguageHat: Yes. So, battle cry, password, watchword, fewmet: thing which identifies the thing. It ought to be the German word for "pathonomic symptom", but it probably isn't.

You can get the "Daily Watchwords" in English or German at:

Evangelischer Ausle4nderdienst e. V.
Ringofenstr. 159
44287 Dortmund
Germany9
Tel +49 231 48923
Fax +49 231 488762
99

Context is everything, yes? Losung/loesung...fewmets (Hey! I knew what they were...too much Shakepseare in high school), passwords (solutions=to solve), scripture...yeah, it made sense to me and I figured that you had probably turned the translation up from an online dictionary. I'm having the same sort of experience with a colleague whose English is only marginally better than my Portuguese.

For a really fun challenge, there was a translation of a number of Shakespeare's plays into German shortly after they had appeared in England...reading Macbeth in High German of the Baroque period makes it to be one very scary sounding play.

Oh, and yes, it IS the very same Brothers Grimm of fairy tale fame...at the time, there was a lot of linguistic work comng out of the study of "Maerchen" and folk tales...

JACKELOPES!

Yeeeehaw! (And we had snipe hunting here, too...gotta have a "gunny sack" to catch 'em, though!)

Unless the Moravians go in for counterpoint, they'll get better-sounding harmony with a hashed lineup.

When events moved that I began exercising in a health club, I started calling wire hangers "yuppie fewmets", because they were how you could tell yuppies had been around. (According to a definition above, these should have been "yuppie spoor" -- they weren't type specimens -- but "fewmets" was a more specific opinion after I'd cleared away a few hundred of them.)
And both of my hardcopy dictionaries say this is an obsolete spelling of "fumet", which (from the same French root) also means the smell of rotten meat....

Yes. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, while best known for "Grimm's Me4rchen", were also professors of German (with a special interest in Old High German, if I recall correctly) and had a fair number of publications besides their collection of fairytales, from German mythology to German grammar. (They were also members of the "Gf6ttingen Seven" and Jacob was a representative of the national assembly in the Paulskirche in 1848, but that's a different story.)