Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Elephants of Khartoum
Zvi Rabbie writes from Los Gatos, Calif., to ask: “With the impending partition of Sudan in the news lately, it would be interesting if you could address the multiple uses of the Hebrew word ḥartom. Besides resembling Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, it’s the word used in the Book of Exodus for Pharaoh’s magicians, while it also…
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News All Over It Like a Rashi Script
Ben Warwick writes: ?After reading your article on italics, Rashi script immediately came to mind. In my yeshiva days, most of the m?farshim [biblical and talmudic commentators] were printed in it. I never really understood why it was used in the first place. As I understand it, Rashi never used it himself. Rather, it developed…
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Culture Sympathy for the Dybbuk
Mort Reichek of Boynton Beach, Fla., asks about the origins of the word “dybbuk.” In Jewish folklore, of course, a dybbuk is the ghost or spirit of a dead person that enters a living one and takes possession of him, causing him to speak and act in irrational and unrecognizable ways. This is by no…
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Culture Stripping Down for Winter
When the days start getting longer but keep getting colder, you know the winter solstice is behind you. In a December 19 New York Times op-ed, Richard Cohen, author of “Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life,” briefly surveyed this yearly turning point’s place in various cultures, taking a…
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Culture All Quiet on Eastern Front
Virginia Gross Levin writes from Broomall, Pa.: “Are you familiar with a Yiddish expression greynetz mentshn “border people”? My great uncle used it to describe our family’s secretive nature. In the 50 years since then, I have never heard it from anyone else. I understand that people on the border had to learn to hold…
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Culture What? Is There Something in the Water?
Henry Lerner writes from Edison, N.J.: “I was recently struck by the following, which I find perplexing. It seems that in many languages, the word for ‘water’ contains in it the word for ‘what.’ Besides English ‘water’ and ‘what,’ for example, we have German wasser and was, Latin aqua and qua, Hebrew mayim and ma,…
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Culture Breaded Acts of Love, Luck and Shipwreck
In a November issue of The Boston Globe, language columnist Jan Freeman, taking advantage of the approaching 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible (the KJV first appeared in 1611), wrote about the many biblical expressions there that have become fully naturalized English idioms. Some of these, she observed, we use regularly,…
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Culture A Worm in the Machine
Irwin Rosenthal writes: “The November 18th New York Times carried an article entitled ‘Worm Was Perfect for Sabotaging Centrifuges.’ In it appeared the sentence: ‘Ralph Langner, a German expert in industrial control systems who has examined the [computer] program [in question] and who was the first to suggest that the worm may have been aimed…
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