Weiner the whiner

History will record that in the second decade of the 21st century, before true three-dimensional exchanges were invented, lovers and strangers send flat pictures of body parts to each other, even intimate ones, in a consecration of trust which was expected to last as long as their trusting relationship would last. But not a minute longer.

Anthony Weiner is cited as a paradigm of this ethereal, transient love. Much is written about him and his faltering quest to run a City that in at least one of the previous mayors’ opinion is ungovernable.

What has not been documented is the etymology of his name, and the total phonetic confusion it represents in America. None of this can be blamed at him — he is a badly beaten horse already. Not that he deserves a break, but I will not participate in the public flogging. He is a self-flagellant, after all, capable of inflicting more wounds on himself than anyone else on earth. In this particular faculty he is only beaten by Donald Trump.

In English, “Weiner” is pronounced the same way as the word for the citizens of Wien, or Vienna. It would rhyme with “meaner.” This is why his name, pronounced in English, sounds like the term for “hot dog,” a sausage allegedly originating in Vienna, though everybody there will distance themselves from this commodity, just the same way as Frankfurters disavow Frankfurters and Hamburgers profess bewilderment about being identified with the sandwich created by placing fried minced meat between patties of fluffy un-German bread.

Weiner, though, in German, would be pronounced the same way as whiner, and this is ironic, you see, since when all this is done and over with, our clown will address the world, in a last bout of solipsism, to tell us about the chance we missed to make New York what? A better place.