On the origin and meaning of the Hungarian idiom Simon bíró ‘Mayor Simon’

Abstract

Simon bíró ‘Mayor Simon’, a Hungarian idiom no longer in use was first recorded in 1541. However, its meaning is not unambiguous: it is ‘virago’ in some collections and ‘henpecked husband’ in others; what is more, some give the meaning as ‘mindless’. There are different explanations of its origin, too. According to one interpretation, the idiom alludes to a mayor called Simon oppressed by his wife, but later it was found that the idiom goes back to a German noun, Siemann ‘henpecked husband’ and thus the idiom is a phraseological loan with a modified form to which the bíró ‘mayor’ component was added later, perhaps influenced by German forms like Doktor Siemann. The German lexeme, Siemann, may also refer to both a virago and a wife-ridden husband, and thus Hungarian may have borrowed the expression with both meanings. The Hungarian idiom has an extended variant, too: Simon bíró hajtja a lovat ‘Mayor Simon drives the horse’. The first appearance of this more complete form is found in Baranyai Decsi (1598) where the completion may have been influenced by its Latin equivalent, Currus bovem trahit ‘The carriage draws the ox’.