Ironic, mussleman/musselman is another word for muslim. In Arabic it is pronounced more like muslimun, but there are lots of variants in many different languages, since Arabic has had an influence on local languages everywhere Islam spread.
There is a group of people in the Southwestern portion of Virginia called Melungeons who it has been speculated have either Turkish or North Africa ancestry. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that a number of people who were brought to the colonies as slaves were North African muslims who were captured and taken to West African ports to be shipped to America.
I just looked it up, and ancestry dot com and a number of other places claim that the Swiss/German name Müsselmann alludes to a past occupation as "probably an occupational name for a woodman, from Middle High German müsel log + man man." That does a pretty good job of demonstrating that similar if not identical symbols can have vastly different origins and vastly different histories. It could be though that even in Switzerland the name musselman means a far distant muslim ancestor. (or maybe they made muesli?)
On a conspiratorial note, I also found a mention of Nazi's referring to some of their prisoners as musselmen, which led me to some claims that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (father of "modern" Turkey) was secretly a gay Jewish Mason who took the Turkish people away from Islam (it is a secular republic, no sharia etc.).
http://secretjews.wordpress.com/
Oh the internet!
That's as far as I was able to get off topic but still "on thread." We've still got a few months to go, so we've got to keep each other entertained somehow.
(I've failed in my attempt to get "quotes" (and brackets) in very line of what I wrote, so don't be "surprised" if I edit some later.)
yall are so darn cute
