Reinhold Aman

Reinhold Aman, giving the finger.

Reinhold Aman (April 8, 1936 – March 2, 2019)^[1] was a former chemical engineer and professor of German, and the publisher of Maledicta, a scholarly journal dedicated entirely to the study of offensive language, also known as maledictology.

Career[]

Aman was born in Fürstenzell near Passau, Bavaria. Prior to working as a translator and clerk for the U.S. Army in Frankfurt, he studied chemical engineering in Augsburg and later worked as a chemical analyst and petroleum chemist in Frankfurt, Munich and Montreal. He moved to Milwaukee in 1959, and worked there as a metallurgist and analytical chemist.

Aman received his baccalaureate from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1965, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in 1968. His dissertation was entitled "Der Kampf in Wolframs Parzival" ("The Battle in Wolfram's Parzival".) During his college years he taught German, French, Spanish, and English at various local high schools, mostly on a part-time basis. In his last year at Texas, he also served as a teaching assistant and teaching associate.

Beginning in 1968, Aman was an assistant professor of German at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (which he later dismissed as "Dungheap U"), where he taught undergraduate and graduate level courses in German grammar, stylistics, conversation, phonetics, philology, medieval and Baroque literature, dialectology, bibliography, and research methods. In 1974, he was fired, stating that he had been denied tenure out of "pure professional jealousy". He subsequently began publishing Maledicta from his home.^[2]

Apart from Maledicta, Aman published Bayrisch-Österreichisches Schimpfwörterbuch ("Bavarian-Austrian Curse Dictionary")^[3] (ISBN 3-86520-095-8) and shorter monographs, as well as various books, including Hillary Clinton's Pen Pal ^[4] (ISBN 0-916500-14-4), a guide to the slang and mores of American prisons, directed to Hillary Clinton. At the time of writing, Clinton was experiencing legal difficulties, and Aman claimed he wanted to turn his recent term in Federal prison (see below) to use by helping her understand the subculture, customs and specialized argot, so that she could avoid potentially-lethal faux pas.

Prison term[]

In 1993, Aman was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for mailing, after a bitter divorce, two threatening postcards to his ex-wife and the allegedly threatening 2-page pamphlet "Legal Slimebags of Wisconsin" to many Wisconsin lawyers and judges. The postcards in question had pasted-up headlines of news articles about bitter ex-husbands killing their ex-wives. He served 15.5 months at Santa Rita, Terminal Island, Lompoc, and Dublin (now a Federal prison for women only), and was released in February 1995.

References[]

Further reading[]

• Miller, Tristan (2020). "Reinhold Aman, 1936–2019". Humor. 33 (1): 1–5. doi:10.1515/humor-2019-0085.

External links[]

• Sheidlower, Jesse (2019-03-13). "Remembering Reinhold Aman". Strong Language. Retrieved 5 September 2021.
• "Insult Artistry". TIME magazine. 1978-01-09. Archived from the original on October 27, 2007.
• David Streitfeld (1993-10-22). "Words; The Damned One; Swearing Was Reinhold Aman's Life. Now It's His Curse". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2011-06-15. (Archived at HighBeam; subscription required)