Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Named for a Rapist?
An e-mailer signing herself as only “Phyllis” asks, “Why is the flower that we call a pansy known as *amnon v’tamar *in Hebrew?” In the Bible, Amnon and Tamar are two names that go together. Chapter 13 of the second Book of Samuel relates how Amnon, a son of King David by one of David’s…
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Culture Deep Panning
Dick Luxner sent me an e-mail in which he inquires whether I know anyone who can read 16th-century Catalan (I don’t), and ended with the P.S.: “Can you confirm my thought that the ‘pan’ in the phrase I remember from my childhood, ‘Wipe that smile off your pan,’ comes from the Yiddish word for face,…
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Culture Putting the Id in Yid
Forward reader Ben Warwick wants to know why the Yiddish words for a Jew and for Yiddish, yid and yidish, are often spelled with an initial alef rather than an initial yod, so that they appear in print as id and idish. This is something I myself have often wondered about. Now, under Mr. Warwick’s…
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Culture A Toast to ‘Coasties’: Regarding an Ethnic Slur in Wisconsin
Marjorie Gottlieb Wolfe, a writer and blogger on Yiddish and Yiddish-related subjects and the author of “Yiddish for Dog & Cat Lovers,” has sent out a group e-mail of which I am a recipient. It’s about the word “coastie,” a term for a fashion-conscious female Jewish undergraduate that has been circulating on and beyond the…
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Culture A Moment Fell Like a Star
Can a literature die with a man? When White Russian-born Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever died in Tel Aviv on January 20 at the age of 96, this may be what happened. Sutzkever was the last great living Yiddish writer, and though it is not inconceivable that he may have successors, this does not seem very…
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Culture A Tree Grows in Zion
Forward reader Marvin Polonsky writes: “I sing in a Jewish chorus that is rehearsing some early Yiddish and Hebrew songs of the halutzim,* the first Zionist pioneers. In one of the Yiddish songs are the lines, **Got, got, groyser got,/Lomir davenen minkhe./Az yidn veln forn keyn eretz-yisroyl,/Vet zayn sosn vesimkhe. Lomir davenen minkhe seems to…
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Culture Errors on a Global And Historical Scale
You would think that Stephen P. Cohen, president of the Institute for Middle East Peace & Development and author of “Beyond America’s Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East,” would know better. In an op-ed column on “Eisenhower, Truman on the Mideast” in the January 8 Boston Globe, Mr. Cohen takes Israel…
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Culture Shedding a Little Light on Sea Monsters and Planets
It was one of the less publicized contests of 2009, and the winners won’t be given any prizes, but there are nonetheless two of them. They are oron and rahav, and they are now the official Hebrew names of the planets Uranus and Neptune, which until now had to be known to Hebrew speakers as,…
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