Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Of Fags, Flags, Faggots and Feygeles
David Herszenson of Manhattan writes: “I know that feygele literally means ‘little bird’ in Yiddish and came to mean ‘gay’ among Yiddish speakers as well. In a rudimentary Internet search, I discovered that the word ‘fag’ began to mean ‘gay’ in American slang in the early 1900s, at the peak of the Eastern European Jewish…
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Culture The Last Philologos Ever?
The announcement in the April 9 issue of the Forward of my 1,000th column took me by surprise because, by my own calculations, the millennium should have come a week later. Perhaps my mistake was failing to count leap years. An extra day every four years may not seem like much, but over a period…
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Culture Daytshmer Nightshmare
Vincent Daly writes from Baltimore: “I’m wondering about the Yiddish word daytshmerish, denoting the Germanified Yiddish used (among other things) for speeches by well-born characters in the early Yiddish theater. Daytsh is clearly Deutsch, i.e., German, and –ish is no problem. But where does the syllable –mer come from?” Daytshmerish is a 19th-century Yiddish word,…
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Culture Gefilte Fish: Bibi and ’Bama’s Latest Fight
With No Apology! On January 25, 1991, in an article titled ‘With Apologies,’ Philologos answered a letter asking about the phonetic similarity of English and Hebrew pronouns. Explaining how these and other similarities were coincidental, Philologos found fertile ground for other, related linguistic observations. Nearly 20 years (1,001 weeks) have passed and below begins the…
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Culture What Are We Commanded To Do?
I’ve written a lot of columns since On Language first started appearing in the Forward more than 19 years ago, and as I’ve tried writing a special column for the Seder night each year, I’ve written 19 Seder night columns, too. It’s only natural, then, to have forgotten some of them — and so when,…
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Culture Signposts to the Middle of Nowhere
Neal Gale writes from St. Paul, Minn.: “My parents, both American-born Yiddish/English speakers, would use two words that referred to places that were hard to find or get to: ‘Yah-Chupetz-Ville’ and ‘Allah-Drerden.’ What do these words really mean?” Mr. Gale’s parents had a sense of humor. “Yah-Chupetz-Ville” is none other than Sholom Aleichem’s Yehupetz, the…
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Culture A Big-Headed Dandy
Bernard Weill writes: “I have often heard the Yiddish word ‘shvitzer’ applied to someone but have been too embarrassed to ask what it meant. Is it a derogatory term?” A shvitzer is a braggart, and the term is definitely derogatory, though not in the extreme. A shvitzer need not necessarily be a bad, unkind or…
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Culture Don’t Talk to the Hand
Leon Kass writes: “Perhaps you can help me with the origin of the Yiddish expression redn tsu der vant, to talk to the wall. Many languages may have such an expression to indicate the futility of efforts to persuade by speech or to gain a hearing for one’s thoughts. But given what became the secularist…
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