Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Sniffing Out a Devil or Two
Dr. Cyril Sherer writes: “Perhaps you can help me with some words I heard during my childhood. (I am now 89.) I grew up in the East End of London, speaking Yiddish with my immigrant grandparents. My vocabulary at that time was limited, since our only subject was food. My father, who was British-born, spoke…
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Culture Mamash Not the Queen’s English
I’ve received a number of responses from readers to my March 4 column on “Yeshivish,” two of which I’ll share with you today. One is scholarly, the other is comic, but what rule states that the two can’t appear side by side? On the scholarly side, the American Jewish linguist Sarah Bunin Benor has sent…
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Culture A Truffle, and 10 Words for ‘Potato’
Irving Zlotnik writes: “There seem to be two commonly used words for the potato in Yiddish, kartofl and bulbe. I know the first comes from German Kartoffel, but where does bulbe come from?” Although different regions of Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe had different words for potatoes — among them, according to Nahum Stutchkoff’s “Thesaurus of the…
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Culture How To Understand Yeshivish
Browsing on the Internet while working on last week’s column, which had to do with a blessing in the morning prayer, I came across the following: “The lechatchila time for shacharis is neitz. B’dieved, if a person davened from amud hashachar and onwards he is yotzei. In a shas hadchak he may daven from amud…
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Culture Waking Up to Who You Are
From Alvin Hall of Myrtle Beach, S.C., comes this query: “One of the birkot ha-shachar, ‘the blessings of the dawn,’ that are recited every day in the morning service is “Barukh ata adonai eloheynu melekh ha’olam she’asani yisra’el,” the standard English translation of which is ‘Blessed are you O Lord our God, King of the…
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Culture Of Gourmands and Rhinos
Was Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman guilty of an oxymoron when, in January, he labeled fellow right-wing Cabinet members who opposed his proposal to investigate the funding of leftist Israeli nongovernmental organizations “faynshmekerim v’karnafim” — that is, “feinshmeckers and rhinoceroses”? An oxymoron — from Greek oxys and moros, which mean not “oxen” and “morons,” but…
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Culture Paid for Reading Tombs? It’s a Stele!
‘I’m a stelaeglyphologist,” Madaleine Isenberg writes, wanting to know what I think of the word. If you’ve never heard of a stelaeglyphologist, you’re in good company. No one has. “It’s a word,” Ms. Isenberg informs us, “that does not exist. I gave birth to it when I was really tired of trying to explain what…
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Culture Was Sarah Palin Actually Blood Libeled?
Did Sarah Palin have justification for calling the accusations that she was responsible, by dint of her rhetoric, for the attempted murder of Gabrielle Giffords and for the deaths of six other people a “blood libel”? Not, of course, if you think Palin can’t say anything right. Nor, it would seem, if you are defending…
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