Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Passing Before the Divine Eye
In last week’s column on the Yiddish expression bobbe mayseh, we saw how folk etymologies, which explain rare or puzzling words by changing or relating them to words understood by everyone, may come into being when the original meanings of words are forgotten. An interesting example of this phenomenon in Jewish tradition involves the Rosh…
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Culture ‘Bubbe Maseh’
Michael Epstein from Milford, N.J., writes: “At a recent Yiddish club meeting, I heard that the expression ‘bubbe maseh’ has nothing to do with a bubbe or grandmother, but has its origins in the name of a medieval knight. Can you shed any light on this?” I’ll be glad to, starting with the observation that…
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Culture Picking @ Shtrudel
In his August 19 column, The New York Times’s venerable language commentator William Safire cites a few examples, taken from a Web site, of words used in different languages to denote the e-mail sign @ that is known in English as “at.” In Czech, writes Mr. Safire, @ is zavinac, meaning “a herring wrapped around…
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Culture Host and Hosted
Noreen Jacks asks: “Can you please tell me if the Hebrew word for hospitality means the same as does the Greek philozenía or ‘love of strangers’? Is there a word for hospitality with the root of the Hebrew word nokhri, ‘stranger,’ in it?” No, there isn’t. The Hebrew word for hospitality is hakhnasat-orh.im. If we…
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Culture Noahide Pause
Irwin Mortman writes: “I have been trying to determine why the suffix ‘ide’ was added to the name Noah to create the adjective ‘Noahide.’ I need the answer to this query since I will be moderating a class where the ‘Noahide laws’ will be discussed, and I am sure someone will ask me why a…
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Culture The Truth About Einstein’s Boat
Marjorie Wolfe read the same article in The New York Times that I did. The article, captioned “At relativity, a genius; as a sailor, not so much: Recalling Einstein’s summer of 1939,” was based on an interview with Long Island resident David Rothman, whose father owned a general store in Cutchogue Harbor that Albert Einstein…
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Culture Master of Reading
Gilad J. Gevaryahu writes to ask my opinion of a grammatical error in Hebrew that he noticed has been spreading in Orthodox religious circles in recent years. It goes back, he points out, to a mistake that was common in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, one that no longer seems mistaken to most people, because it has…
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Culture Hebrew vs. Jewish
Bert Horwitz from Asheville, N.C., writes: “Recently, while listening to Prokofiev’s ‘Overture on Hebrew Themes,’ which is music with decidedly Yiddish refrains, it struck me that the difference between ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Jewish’ needs illuminating. Can the intellectual de-legitimization of Israel be due to the mistaken notion that, because a Jew is a follower of Judaism,…
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