Reinhold Aman

Reinhold Aman (April 8, 1936 – March 2, 2019) was a chemical engineer and professor of German before achieving national and even international recognition as the publisher of Maledicta, a scholarly journal dedicated to the study of offensive language, also known as maledictology.

Career Aman was born in Fürstenzell near Passau, Bavaria.

Apart from Maledicta, Aman published a Bayrisch-Österreichisches Schimpfwörterbuch ("Bavarian-Austrian Curse Dictionary") and shorter monographs as well as various books, including Hillary Clinton's Pen Pal: A Guide to Life and Lingo in Federal Prisons (1996). At the time, Clinton was experiencing legal difficulties, and Aman claimed he wanted to make use of his recent term in federal prison to inform her about prison customs and argot so that she could avoid potentially lethal faux pas.

Personal life, prison term, and final years In 1993, following a bitter divorce from his wife Shirley Aman, Aman was convicted on three counts of mailing threatening communications and sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for sending numerous Wisconsin lawyers and judges accounts of how he believed they should be shot, as well as for sending two postcards to his ex-wife with pasted-on headlines of news articles about women killed by their former husbands. The sentence was reduced to 18 months on appeal;