Pets: papers, training and care

The word to read twice in this list is die Tollwutimpfung, the rabies jab entered in every Heimtierausweis. Rabies is die Tollwut, and a learner who knows toll only as a cheerful « great » will wonder what is so great about it. Nothing is: the disease is named after an older meaning. For centuries toll meant mad, out of one’s mind, so die Tollwut is quite literally the mad rage. That sense survives in a few fixed words — tollkühn, foolhardy; das Tollhaus, a madhouse, now used mostly figuratively; die Tollkirsche, deadly nightshade, whose berries bring on delirium — while the everyday adjective drifted from crazy to crazy-good, rather as « terrific » once meant terrifying. English kept the same old word as well and sent it somewhere else again: « dull », which in Old English meant foolish.