Reinhold Aman
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, 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".) 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.
From 1968 to 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 ( ISBN 3-86520-095-8), shorter monographs, as well as various books, including Hillary Clinton's Pen Pal ( ISBN 0-916500-14-4), a guide to the slang and mores of American prisons, directed to Hillary Clinton.
External links
- "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 from the original on 2011-06-15. (Archived at HighBeam; subscription required)
