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Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, many cultures don't see honesty as a value on its own. In Polish there's a word "frajer" which is an offensive term for someone who got cheated or didn't take advantage of a situation. The logic is that, if the society as a whole is dishonest, then it doesn't make sense to be a martyr recognized by no-one, and it's better to make sure you take care of yourself first.

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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_...

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.

Yiddish is a German language.

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.

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.

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".

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.

It did not develop exclusively from high German, as I wrote before and it was geographically widespread enough for clear Eastern vs Western dialects to emerge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish_dialects#Eastern_Yiddi...

Rather than existing "in the area we would now call west Germany" as you would like to believe for some reason. Eastern Yiddish in particular is much more than "a German language" (unless you want to call Polish a German language as well).

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.

Freier is not F*cker, just someone who needs to pay for sex, and is more independent then

No it more likely comes from archaic "freien", which still is used for "to marry" but used to mean something slightly different ;)

They still use a variant of that word in Dutch: vrijen. With the old meaning.. ;)

The even older meaning is "courter".

Also, 'chutzpah' which has a sense of being proud of trying to get away with it, unashamed.

The word is widely used in Russian as well.

Reminds me about covid time math competition. It had to be taken online. Usually maximum score can be reached by less than a dozen of students, but when competition was online there were over 3000 math geniuses

https://wiadomosci.onet.pl/kraj/koronawirus-gigantyczne-rozb...

Unfortunately very similar to Uruguay, where I grew up. One of the many reasons I haven't lived there for a while now :(

To pile on top: also pretty similar to Brazilian culture where following the rules will be looked down as being stupid (since everyone else isn't abiding by them, you doing it is considered as self-handicapping).

One of my least favourite features of Brazil and definitely in the top 3 reasons why I left the country more than a decade ago.

In Czech Republic, under communism, they used to say:

    "If you are not stealing from the state, you are stealing from your own family."

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