Having spent my entire life (27 years) in Germany I have never heard or seen this use of the word "Krupp" before!

Around the Nazi time there existed the saying "Hart wie Kruppstahl" (Eng: "hard as Krupp steel"), but that's quite antiquated (besides, the company is named Thyssen-Krupp today).

Did you know that Emo is Chinese?

Local slang probably.

Speaking of which I always imagined there quite a difference between east and west slang. Even all these years since reunification. Does such a divide exist?

There are indeed differences between East and West German speech habits. Even East Germans speaking standard German instead of a distinctive dialect (an extreme, instantly recognisable dialect example would be Saxonian) often show a certain choice of words and small grammatical differences that betray their origin.

He's using the wrong translation, though. Wuxing, the corporation, is 五行. Which is "five elements." 五星 would indeed be "five stars", but that's the wrong "xing."

Page 76 of Portfolio of a Dragon mentions that the corporation's name means "five elements."

Ooooh, I get it. I can definitely see how rendering Chinese words in Roman characters would cause confusion, though.

Is he? I'd always assumed he was American of Chinese ancestry.

~J

Never heard the term used where I spend the last decade. And that is only 30km from the "Villa Hügel" (Home of the Krupp Dynastie) in the Ruhr Valley. Neither heard that back in Braunschweig where I spend quite some time with Ex-GDR citizins shortly after germanies second-biggest mistake.

We have an Illness known as (Pseudo)Krupp, a lung/bronchial thing IIRC. Aside from that, it's part of the "classical": "Tough as Leather, Hard as Krupp Steel, Fast as the racing dogs" motto given out to the german use by a certain second rate Austrian painter. "Krupp Stahl" is actually a special type of surface hardened steel (Krupp Cementit Verfahren) used for warships.

What clued you in? Was it my apparent lack of self-discipline?

It doesn't appear in Chinese lettering anywhere in print, but it does appear in print as translating to "five elements." There's only one way to write "five elements" in Chinese lettering that also comes out as "Wuxing."

Proteus is the actual name of another greek mythological figure, a minor god, "old man of the sea" with shapeshifting powers.

"Saeder", as in Saeder-Krupp, is the danish for "seat" or something like that. I doesn't seem to be used as a family name, thought I don't see how it could end up with a company called "Seat Munitions" or "Seat Strategic Industries". My guess is that some US authors randomly made up a name that sounded German (as far as I remember, S-K appeared first in the NAGNA, some times before german authors walked in with the Germany sourcebook).
At some point during the writing of SoE, I toyed with the idea of having Saeder being an acronym who lost capitalization (like Fiat). Having 'SA' at the beginning of a French company name is a common feature, it's like having 'AG' at the beginning of a German company name (besides, SA et AG are similar type of companies). But anyway there wasn't enough room in the book to put everything.

Likely not. Proteus was an actual mythological figure of his own right. Typically portrayed as the son of Poseidon, he was sea-going and could change shape. He also was gifted with prophesy, but was very stingy and never told anyone what he saw.


A Proteus is also a class of bacteria typically associated with urinary tract infections. I'm betting it's in reference to the god, though.

The official English name ist "Frankfurt Bank Association (FBA)", though.

Officially: "Bavarian Motor Works".

I think you mean "Mobile Intervention Force 2000".

What clued me in was that time when you said it in a post.

Hey now. Let's be fair.




He may be a citizen of the USA, and he may be stupid, but that's no reason to propigate slurs.