Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture The Shah Has Died
Zev Shanken of Teaneck, N.J., has an interesting question about chess, the modern Hebrew word for which is shah.mat, spelled hngy, with a Tet as its final letter. Since shah.mat comes from Russian shakhmaty, which is related to English “checkmate”; and since both these words, like similar expressions in other European languages (for example, Italian…
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Culture Think ‘Fast’
Tantalizingly brief is a note from an e-mailer who identifies himself only as “Brodetzky,” no first name given. It says: “‘Mach gich!’ was my command to a platoon of German soldiers that had ambushed my battalion’s advance to the Rhine River in March 1945. We had outflanked and ambushed the ambushers, but they did not…
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Culture Would One Name a Teddy Bear ‘Jesus’?
Sometimes things you have wondered idly about for years find their solution unexpectedly in passing. This is what happened to me recently while following the story of the British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who was convicted in Sudan of the crime of letting her pupils call the class teddy bear “Mohammed.” My reflections on the fate…
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Culture Hora – A History Of The Most Famous Jewish Dance
‘If you have ever been to a Jewish wedding,” New York Times science writer Natalie Angier wrote two weeks ago, “you know that sooner or later the ominous notes of ‘Hava Nagila’ will sound, and you will be expected to dance the hora. And if you don’t really know how to dance the hora, you…
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Culture A Bur in the Talmudist’s Side
Forward reader Kenny Steinman writes: “In a recent Talmud lesson, my friends and I came across the Hebrew term bur in the sense of an unlettered person or ignoramus. Might this be related to the biblical ba’ar, as in the verse in Psalms that begins, Ish ba’ar lo yeda, ‘The dull man does not know’?…
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Culture A Condi Conundrum
Writing last week in The New York Times, Israel correspondent Steven Erlanger remarked that preparations for the Annapolis, Md., summit have contributed a new verb to the Hebrew language: Le’kandel, “to come and go for meetings that produce few results,” coined from the first name of Condoleezza Rice. I myself have yet to encounter le’kandel…
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Culture Back to Mamre
Seth Cohen of Mamaroneck, N.Y., has an interesting suggestion to make in regard to my column of two weeks ago on oaks and terebinths in the book of Genesis. You may recall that in discussing the correct translation of Genesis 18:1, “And God appeared to him [Abraham] in elonei mamre,” I wondered why the first-century…
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Culture Stating the Obvious
The story is told about Josef Stalin at the Yalta Conference that, bored by a discussion about the role of the Vatican in postwar Europe, he asked brusquely, “How many divisions has the pope?” He had a point: The pope had none. And yet, although diplomatic verbal disputes often seem academic, the diplomats continue to…
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