The Heroes Have Grown Tired [...] Remarks on the Use of the Catchword Hero/erou in German and Romanian

Abstract

The paper undertakes to study the lexeme "hero" on different linguistic levels in both German and Romanian. The paper follows two theses. The first thesis is that thanks to the compositeness of German, the free morpheme "hero" is part of many composites, either as a first member or as a second member of a composition. There are many other composites, some of which are occasionalisms and some of which are linguistically assertive, besides those in digital and printed dictionaries. The second thesis posits that the colloquial and ironic uses of the word, along with its pejorative connotations, are becoming increasingly significant, resulting in a noticeable difference in the meaning representation of the lexeme across both languages, albeit to varying degrees.