Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Sorcerer for the Goose and Gander
A reader who may prefer to remain anonymous sends me an email in which he describes recently hearing his sister call his elderly mother a “machashefer,” a term with which he was not familiar. The letter continues: “I asked my sister what she meant by ‘machashefer,’ and she said it’s a witch. She then told…
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Culture Third Time’s L’Chaim
We can’t seem to get away from l’chaim. At least it’s a happy word. In two previous columns, as you may remember, I spoke of l’chaim as a Jewish toast deriving from the Kiddush, the blessing said before drinking wine on Sabbath eves and holidays; dismissed several explanations offered by readers as to why Jews…
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Culture From Hebrew to… Hebrew
For a while now I’ve been hearing about a new translation of the Hebrew Bible, called Tanach Ram. (Tanakh, of course, is Hebrew for “Bible,” an acronym composed of Torah, the Five Books of Moses; Nevi’im, the Prophets, and K’tuvim, the other biblical writings, while Ram is the name of an Israeli publishing house.) What…
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Culture Cheers! We’re Not Poisoned — Or Are We?
Two interesting comments have come from readers about [my November 25 column][1] on the Jewish toast “l’chaim,” which I traced back to a medieval custom, still practiced by Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews, that is connected to the Kiddush, the traditional Sabbath and holiday blessing over wine. The first of these, from Harold Zvi Slutzkin…
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Culture ‘Yahweh’ Should Not Offend Anyone
Reader Peter Siegel is upset by my November 11 column, titled “From Bono to Yahweh.” (Online it was called “How Yahweh Got Its Verbal Vibe Back.”) He writes: Why in the world would your article and title include a spelling of the name of G-d that offends many, many Jews from Orthodox to Reform, who…
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News Who’s Scoring a ‘Jew Goal’?
Not being an avid soccer fan, I needed an article in the English language edition of the Israeli daily, Haaretz, to alert me to a new expression that has been making the rounds, i.e., a ?Jew goal.? As recently defined by Haaretz?s Anshel Pfeffer, a Jew goal is ?an attack on the goal in which…
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Culture L’Chaim a Bad Grammatical Error?
Marvin Kastenbaum has a question inspired by my column of October 21, which dealt with the practice, common among American Jews, of saying “l’Shana tova,” “For a good year,” instead of simply “Shana tova,” “A good year,” at Rosh Hashanah time. The column pointed out that l’shana tova is a shortening of l’shana tova tikateyvu,…
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Culture How ‘Gay’ Lost Its ‘Shtick’ Over Time
Orin Hargraves, who describes himself as “an independent lexicographer and contributor to numerous dictionaries,” has sent me an Internet article whose point of departure is a June column of mine about the Yiddish word “shtick.” There I pointed out that “shtick” has acquired a new meaning in American English — that of a gripe or…
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