(1) I think that there are reasonable grounds for believing that a substantial segment of the British aristocracy might be familiar with the German word “unberufen” by the 1840s (i.e., after Victoria became queen).
George I, a German, became king of the U.K. in 1714. His successor, George II, was also a German. The wives of George III, George IV, William IV, and Prince Edward (Queen Victoria’s father) were all Germans.
Thus, by the time that Victoria became queen in 1837, Germans had been in the British court for over 100 years – time enough to introduce one little word – “unberufen” – into the aristocracy’s vocabulary.
(2) I apologize to everyone for diverting the discussion from P.G. Wodehouse’s story “Right Ho, Jeeves” to Queen Victoria’s vocabulary.
As the somewhat bemused author of this doubly revived zombie, I just wanted to say that although I had pretty much set aside my original doubts about unberfen about eight and a half years ago (post #12), I appreciate JeremiahHorrocks’ extensive research and thoughtful posts, and the other recent contributions to the thread.
And to Spectre and Leo, please forgive my dillettantish ignorance of the details of Bertie’s aunts, and other things Wodehousian.
In general, there are a lot of contradictions of this sort in Wodehouse’s work. ISTM that he did not concern himself with consistency in his little world.
The inconsistencies are rarely of much significance, however. I notice a few cases of first names getting mixed up, which doesn’t seem too important since nobody ever gets addressed by their first name except by aunts and other relatives.
Most jarring to me was the way Oofy Prosser is frequently described as the only money man in the Drones club and the guy everyone invariably tries to touch, despite his stingy nature. This despite the fact that Bertie Wooster is also a Drones club member and a wealthy guy and a very easy touch. In general, the Drones Club appears a lot in stories focusing on Bertie, but Bertie does not appear in stories focusing on Drones. This includes Bingo Little, Bertie’s great pal, who goes to great lengths to get a bit of cash out of Oofy and never considers Bertie.
Or even Mervyn Mulliner, who tries unsuccesfully to touch Oofy and never considers his own cousin and fellow DC member Archibald Mulliner, who is very wealthy.
Speaking of which there’s Aurelia Cammerleigh, Archie Mulliner’s beloved. In the first story, he has to try to impress her only relative, her nutty aunt. In the second, he tries to break his engagment by insulting her father.
And then there’s Lord Emsworth’s innumerable sisters.
That’s off the top of my head. But that’s been my general impression. Wodehouse is about the goofball mindset and turn of phrase. Everything else is unimportant and I don’t think he paid much attention to it.
Wodehouse spent most of his professional life in theater as well.
Offhand–no cites, which shows I’m losing my chops:
The two film studio producers, each run by a guy with an obvious Jewish name. In one the stories they compete (and combine?) to ensure their liquor stock during prohibition.
The stage producer whose 10-year old son has the intelligence of the average playgoer, who gets the chump Cyril fired.
In a novel, the producer who gets the title character to invest in his play.
Actually, brilliant as his goofball mindsets and spectacular way with English, Wodehouse claimed the hardest, longest, and chief difficulty in his writing was devising the intricate slip-sliding plots. The rest he just banged away, as I think he put it.
Dear friends – I recently speculated about the frequency of use of the world “unberufen” during the 18th and 19th century. However, it is one thing to speculate and quite another to find the evidence to support one’s speculations. Google Books provides a means of searching for the occurrence of a word or name among its vast collection of scanned books. So I decided to search for the occurrence of “unberufen” among Google Books. I was stunned by the results, which were not at all what I’d expected.
I searched books between 1750 and 1950. Among the books that Google searched, the word “berufen” first appeared in 1864 and then disappeared by 1873. (It appeared mainly in German-English dictionaries or in novels or in books about Jewish mysticism.) It reappeared in 1888 and soared to a peak in 1905, after which it declined, with several minima – in 1913, 1932, and near extinction in 1942 – although it recovered thereafter.
Here’s the link to one of my searches for “unberufen” in Google Books (from 1860 to 1950)–
Notice that the page displays a graph of the incidence of the word vs. the year.
Under the graph, it lists various time periods. If you click on any one of those time periods, Google Books will display the books (from that period) in which it found the word “unberufen”, with an extract of the text featuring the word “unberufen” in boldface.
You can change the start and end dates of the search if you want, and you can search for other words if you want.
I have on my bookshelf a single-volume French-English-German dictionary published by F.A. Brockhaus, Leipzig, in 1861.
The entry in the German section for “unberufen”, listing the French and English equivalents, is:
Unberufen, a. & ad. sans vocation, sans qualification; not called for, meddling.
My 1980 Collins Gem German-English dictionary translates it as “touch wood”.
Aunt Dahlia was very much aristocratic. In her youth, before WW1, she hunted with the Quorn, doubtless in the company of members of the Court at least some of whom would have been German-speaking, as was the Royal Family in those days. She would also have associated with other members of the aristocracy with close ties to the Court. Her automatic response of “oom beroofen” to what she interpreted as a sneeze by Bertie would not have been out of place given this background.
Coming in twelve years after the original question may seem late but I get the impression that the enquirer was interested in the meaning of the word/phrase itself, not necessarily in the context.
“Umberufen”, possibly in Jewish families more than others, is used in German where “Touch wood” or “God willing” is used in English.
