She asked me to come with her, so I followed her into the room. We were alone. She was attractive. And she wasted no time with pleasantries. "Get undressed please!" she said.

But wait! This wasn't a daydream. This was the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. And the words she spoke were German. Not, "Zieh dich bitte aus!" Rather, "Machen Sie sich bitte frei!" That, gentle reader, could only mean one thing: I'd been led into an examining room. The young blonde was a nurse. The doctor would be in shortly. I hoped it wouldn't hurt.

It did.

What were you thinking?

Sich freimachen, which can also mean "to take time off work," is the official way of saying "to get undressed," literally "to make oneself free (of clothing)." This is the meaning of frei in Freikörperkultur ("free-body culture," i.e. nudism), which is quite popular in these parts.

A body that's been "made free" isn't necessarily one that's been disrobed or allowed leisure time, though. The Nazis -- who advocated freedom through work, not freedom from work -- attached the cynical motto Arbeit Macht Frei ("Work Makes [One] Free") to the entrances of some of their concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Laborers there, as we know, were typically made free of their lives.

Then there's einen Brief freimachen, "to put a postage stamp (or stamps) on a letter," freeing it for delivery -- or rather, freeing it from an obstacle to delivery, namely no prepayment.

Frei (and its English cognate, "free") has an interesting background -- it's a love child. Linguists say an early meaning was "beloved," "belonging to the loved ones" (cf. Gothic frijon, "to love"). A related word is Freund ("friend") -- originally "loved one," "lover." The archaic German verb freien means "to marry"; also "to court," "to woo." Hence a Freier is a "suitor." Today Freier is chiefly a euphemism for a customer of a prostitute, or "john."

For the ancient Germans, frei was a legal term. "Belonging to the loved ones" were kinfolk and fellow tribesmen, and frei came to mean "protected," "enjoying full rights," "not in bondage." The modern meanings of frei developed from this.

They're diverse. Take the three compound nouns Freibier, Freibad, and Freitod, literally "free beer," "free swimming pool," and "free death." While Freibier is what you think it would be, a Freibad isn't a swimming pool that costs nothing to use. It's a swimming pool im Freien, or unter freiem Himmel ("under the free [i.e. open] sky") -- that is, an "outdoor swimming pool."

And a Freitod is neither a death outdoors nor a death that costs nothing, such as one outdoors as opposed to in a hospital, where you're fed through the arm and pay through the nose. A Freitod is a "suicide," i.e. a voluntary -- freely chosen -- death.

Hmm. Could Patrick Henry have had it both ways by blowing his brains out?