Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Kalanter Banter
An eponym is a word formed from someone’s name. Most languages have them, and English alone has hundreds — some that are clearly so, and others disguised as ordinary-looking words. You don’t have to be an etymologist or a newspaper reader to guess that “Ponzi scheme” probably derives from a man named Ponzi. On the…
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News Standing up for El Al?s Good Name
Samuel Sherman writes from Voorhees, N.J.: ?I?m curious about the name of Israel?s airline, El Al. As far as I know (which probably isn?t enough) el and al are both prepositions in Hebrew, meaning ?to,? and ?on,? ?above? or ?about,? respectively. How can one preposition be the object of another preposition? Can al be a…
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Culture A Good Guy To Know
What would you say about a lifeguard who took nearly two-and-a-half years to answer a cry for help? Well, that’s me. Rummaging through a drawer of my desk the other day, I found this letter from Carolyn Shapiro of Washington, D.C., dated July 2, 2007: “Worthy Philologos, “Help! Help! I am a member of a…
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Culture How Many Circles Has Gehinom?
‘In order to receive a building permit, you have to pass through the seven circles of hell,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared not long ago, in a Hebrew address in which he spoke of the need to streamline bureaucratic procedures that make Israeli life difficult. The Hebrew idiom “to pass through the seven circles of…
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Culture Yiddish for Comrades
The week of Yom Kippur, you may recall, I published a column about a Yiddish letter, written by a young soldier in the Russian army to his family during World War I, that a reader asked me to decipher. In doing so, I pointed out that the letter writer, although his spelling was generally good,…
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Culture Hi, Harvey! How’s It Going?
Hi, readers! If I’ve never addressed you that way in the past, it’s because until a few years ago, no one started a written English communication by hi-ing anyone. If you were writing a letter to someone named Harvey Rosenblum, you would begin it, if you wished to be formal, “Dear Mr. Rosenblum.” If you…
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Culture Standing Up and Leading the Way
Sybil Terres Gilmar writes from Philadelphia: “Recently, as part of my work as a docent at Mikveh Israel, the oldest continuous congregation in Philadelphia (since 1740), I came across the word ‘duchening’ in conjunction with an early 19th-century chair adorned with hands indicating the priestly blessing. In trying to research the origin of the word,…
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News What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us?
At the end of last week?s column about the traditional use of Hebrew characters to write Jewish languages, like Yiddish and Ladino, I promised that this week?s column would deal with the opposite development ? namely, the growing tendency in America to write Yiddish in Latin characters. More and more, one finds Yiddish written that…
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