"Mullered," in the original form?
Yesterday, we talked about Mick McCarthy’s postgame comments after his Wolves team held on for a huge 1-0 win over Tottenham. Here’s McCarthy’s quote again:
”Marcus Hahnemann’s not been diving around making saves everywhere. He made one really good save and no, we haven’t been mullered. They have to work like that at every game. If we have any passengers we’re knackered.”
To us, it was all a bit like this (see 30-second mark):
Since Babelfish doesn’t have a Limey-to-Yank platform (or, as an astute reader pointed out, Limey-pretending-to-be-Irish-to-Yank, per McCarthy), we had to depend on the input of readers, both in-the-know Yanks, and native Britons, or, as we like to call them here, Those for Whom A Great Sadness Looms on June 12 (Hey-O!).
Some of their translations can be seen in the comments of the original post. We thank them for the input, and they all agreed on the definitions of the terms in question—‘mullered’ and ‘passengers’ (we could handle ‘knackered’). ‘Mullered means “soundly beaten, or battered,” and a “passenger” is someone not pulling their weight.
But an interesting point of divergence emerges around the etymology of the term ‘mullered.’ We suspected the great German striker Gerd Muller was somehow involved. He did batter many an opponent’s 18-yard box, after all. But our UK contacts assured us this was not the case.
So we did what we usually do in times of Internet confusion and doubt—we turned to Urban Dictionary. There, you’ll find no fewer than 10 definitions for the term, with two conflicting etymologies scattered through the entry.
At the top is the Gerd Muller derivation, and with the seventh entry comes the surprising ‘yogurt cognate,’ which submits the following definition and etymology:
“To be absolutely off your face on drink and drugs, derived from the Yoghurt manufacturer Muller, after people (mostly gimps) used to go round sayin Creamed, Creamed turned to Mullered.”
The proof may or may not be in the...er, yogurt.
So there you have it. ‘Mullered’ has multiple, somewhat synonymous, definitions and derives from either a German soccer legend or a yogurt manufacturer.
Now what are ‘gimps’?
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