Reinhold Aman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Reinhold Aman (born April 8, 1936) is a former chemical engineer and professor of German, and the publisher of Maledicta, a scholarly journal dedicated entirely to the study of offensive language.
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[edit] 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".) During his college years he taught the German, French, Spanish, and English languages 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.
From 1968-1974, Aman was an assistant professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (which he now dismisses 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.
Apart from Maledicta, Aman has published Bayrisch-Österreichisches Schimpfwörterbuch [1] (ISBN 3-86520-095-8), shorter monographs, as well as various books, including Hillary Clinton's Pen Pal [2] (ISBN 0-916500-14-4), a guide to the slang and mores of American prisons, directed to Hillary Clinton. At the time of writing, Mrs. Clinton was experiencing legal difficulties, and Dr. 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.
[edit] Prison term
In 1993, Aman was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for mailing, after a bitter divorce, two "prank" 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. Because of a judicial error and his "good behavior" in prison, he actually served 15-1/2 months at Santa Rita, Terminal Island, Lompoc, and Dublin (now a Federal prison for women only), and was released in February of 1995.
[edit] Online presence
In addition to sharing his expertise in languages and verbal aggression, and renowned for his sarcastic wit, Aman is inclined to a vituperative mode of discourse and is known in certain Usenet newsgroups as one inclined to participate in flame wars.
[edit] Personal life
Aman was married in 1960; has a daughter, Susan, born in 1964; and was divorced in 1990 (see "Prison term"). He now lives near Santa Rosa, California.
[edit] References
- Insult Artistry. TIME magazine (1978-01-09).
- David Streitfeld (1993-10-22). Words; The Damned One; Swearing Was Reinhold Aman's Life. Now It's His Curse.. The Washington Post. (Archived at HighBeam; subscription required)
