I’m reading a book right now (non-fiction) in which the author mentions in passing that “Neuwirth encouraged Bob in the psychological games he enjoyed, an advanced form of Glissendorf that verged on the sadistic.” I’ve googled my little heart out trying to understand this statement. From context, it sounds like some sort of mind game, but I can’t find any cites on this, just a bunch of folks with that last name. Can anybody else grok this?
“thin village” in Norwegian 
The first match on “glissendorf game” on Google brought up this description from Google Books, presumably a fragment of the text of a book called Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan:
Unfortunately, the linked page doesn’t have the full quote, and there’s no “cached” link.
Gives an idea, though …
That’s actually the book I’m reading that I pulled my quote from. So that means I’m a dumbass, because I’ve already read that part, I just didn’t remember it. (It’s my bathroom book, so I’m not reading it continuously). the full quote:
In my defense, the quote I initially gave appears about 120 pages after the one that explains the nature of the game. Oh well. Carry on.
What?
It would be German: Dorf = Village, but there is a close cognate in Norwegian: Thorp. In fact, there are quite a few -thorps in England, in the area previously known as the Danelaw.
Although there’s a town called Glissen in Germany, the word glissen itself pops up as Norwegian.
Sure, I just thought that is was remarkably bit of inspired nonsense translation, and wanted to hear the reasoning behind it, since “dorf” is the most german of all german placename suffixes, and “glissen” is a norwegian word, but it doesn’t mean “thin”.
scans link Ah, I see what you mean, but you can’t reanslate “glissen” directly into “thin”. The word can only be used to describe things that are not dense or crowded, i.e. “sparse”. It does not carry the other meanings of “thin”.
“-torp”(not, as in english, “thorp”), is more common in danish than Norwegian place-names, but does exist, mostly in the southeast. Norwegian placenames commonly have -stad, -set or -tveit instead.
And you may now return to your regularly scheduled hijack.