Resuming my series of posts on important moments in the history of language, today I give you the genesis and legacy of the word “quisling.” This is a relatively recent term, and means “traitor,” and it is definitely not a complement.
Quisling began as a riff off of the surname of the Norweigen politician named Vidkun Quisling (d 1945), who collaborated with the Nazis and led a puppet regime in Norway.
Wikipedia’s biography of Vidkun is fascinating, and cites work by the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung stating that the OG Quisling was “a mini-Hitler with a CMT (chosenness-myth-trauma) complex” and a “dictator and a clown on the wrong stage with the wrong script”.
Quisling was arrrested and tried after WWII ended, and was charged for “conspiring with Hitler over the invasion and occupation of Norway”. He was convicted and executed by firing squad. After a British newspaper ran a headline in 1940 entitled “Quislings Everywhere,” his name was ensconced in the English language to mean “traitor”.
Fun fact that fits in with Quisling’s narcissist and grandiose personality: he lived in a mansion he called “Grimle” which in Norse mythology was a place survivors of the end-timey battle Ragnarök dwelt. The homestead is now a Holocaust Museum.
Source(s): Wikipedia. “What exactly is a Quisling?” Jan 12, 2019, Neil Shipley, _Watching the Swedes_.
