"Erzittre, feiger Bösewicht!" - "Ich bin zwar Verbrecherin"

 These are lines from "The Magic Flute" that jumped to my mind recently and made me go 'hmmmh'.

A "Bösewicht" is an evil guy, from "böse" = "evil" and "Wicht" ... yes, well, that's probably the rub.

"Wicht" would seem to be related to "Wichtel" which is a dwarf/pixie/elf - but then the suffix -el is a diminuitive, so maybe a "Wicht" is not per se a "small guy" (which is what it would seem to mean today, though today it's not a word you'd really use at all), but just a word for 'guy' with negative connotations (it certainly has those) - so, an evil guy, really (making "Bösewicht" a bit of a tautology in order to stress the "evil" part). 

(Also (and supporting the above, I think), a "Wicht" is a close relation to a "wight" (those silent "gh" combos in English used to be pronounced in Old English and sounded like the "ch" in German words) - and those are not exactly nice guys, either.)

The thing is that nowadays (maybe because of "Wichtel", still in common use) you would not use "Bösewicht" to refer to something seriously evil or scary. If you use it, it'll be slightly tongue-in-cheek and generally rather harmless. In "The Magic Flute", by contrast, it is clearly seriously evil. The implication here is an habitual evildoer, someone who is evil by nature.

- which brings us to the second quote and the next part of this entry, the concept of the word "Verbrechen".

A "Verbrechen" in modern German is serious. It translates as "(serious) crime" and a "Verbrecher" - which translates as "criminal" - in common usage is really a bit more than someone who has committed a crime, it's someone who commits crimes because that is what they do - a habit or (you'll guess what I'm getting at by now) something in their nature.

However, in "The Magic Flute", we have sweet Pamina calling herself "Verbrecherin", something she certainly isn't by modern usage of the word. So, extreme hyperbole? Maybe a bit, but I think it's a case of change of meaning. It's a curious word, that one. The prefix "ver-" is very common but has no one clear meaning or derivation. The "brechen" part is easier - it means "break". A crime is a breach of a rule. So if you break a rule what you do is a "Verbrechen". In fact, one online dictionary entry informed me, with apparent astonishment, that "Verbrechen" is an old word and in medieval times was used for small infringements as well as proper crimes. And that would seem to me to be exactly the point. You break a rule, it is a "Verbrechen". Pamina has certainly broken a rule (i.e. done what she knew she wasn't supposed to). What in this context it is not, however, is something that marks you as evil by nature. That is only the modern connotation of the word. 

So, what I see here are two words that basically swapped their connotations:

Bösewicht 

• 18th century: person of evil nature
• today: somewhat naughty boy

Verbrecher

• 18th century: someone who breaks a rule 
• today: evildoer