Combat sports

Die Auslage leads three lives, and only one of them is in the ring. In a shop it is the window display, the goods laid out for passers-by to look at. In the plural, die Auslagen, it is money spent on somebody else’s behalf and waiting to be paid back — the word on an expenses claim. And in boxing and fencing it is the stance: which foot and which hand go forward. What holds the three together is the verb auslegen, to lay out — goods on a counter, cash for a colleague, a body towards an opponent. A right-hander normally fights aus der Linksauslage, left foot and lead hand forward; the fighter who reverses it is der Rechtsausleger, a word German politics has borrowed for somebody standing well to the right. A sentence such as Sie wechselte die Auslage therefore needs its setting before it can be read at all.