Philologos
By Philologos
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News Kittel, Kirtle
Herbert L. Foster of Edgartown, Mass., wants to know whether there is a linguistic connection between the kittel, the white robe worn by some observant Jews on the High Holy Days and other solemn occasions, and the English kirtle, defined by his dictionary as either “a woman’s loose gown, worn in the middle ages,” or…
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News Peace in the Plural
Samuel Sherman from Cherry Hill, N.J., writes: “In the traditional Hebrew and Yiddish greeting of shalom aleykhem, literally, ‘peace be upon you,’ the ‘you’ [aleykhem] is masculine plural, but the greeting is the same whether one is addressing many people or just one. And in the Catholic church there is a Latin greeting, pax vobiscum,…
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News Counting Our Blessings
Rabbi Jonathan H. Gerard of Temple Covenant of Peace in Easton, Pa., writes that he has “been thinking about the word barukh as we use it in the liturgy.” The Hebrew word barukh is almost always translated as “blessed,” and Rabbi Gerard is of course referring to its widespread use in the many “blessings” [berakhot]…
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News A Boarder in the Golden Land
It’s sad but enlightening to see a nice theory shot down. Two of you have done this with my speculation that British “boydem,” in the slang sense of “police,” might have come, via the Cockney speech of Jewish-immigrant London, from Yiddish boydem, meaning “attic.” One letter comes from David Samson, who writes that he was…
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News The Sabbath Planet
Ze’ev Orzech writes from Corvallis, Ore.: “I am intrigued by the connection between the Hebrew name for the planet Saturn, shabtai, which comes from Shabbat, and the word ‘Satur’ or ‘Saturn’s day.’” How, he asks, are we to explain this? That there is indeed a connection seems beyond doubt. The question is what came first….
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News Borat’s Buffoonery
Among readers of the Forward, I may be the last on the block to see Sacha Baron Cohen’s film, “Borat”; in Israel it started showing only two weeks ago. Actually, I had been waiting for it impatiently. After all, how many box office hits are there that have Hebrew as their secret language? All the…
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News Boydem II:Yiddish and Cockney?
We ended last week’s column with the Yiddish expression plotkes, loksh, boydem, politsa, “crappies, noodles, attic, shelf,” or alternately, loksh, boydem, politsa or boydem mit politsa, in the sense of an unrelated hodgepodge, or, as one says in colloquial English, “everything but the kitchen sink.” Why these particular four items were chosen to express the…
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News Boydem
My French Vietnamese friend Sabine Huynh, a poet and professio sraeli, sent me the following e-mail: “When I told the Israeli friend who came for dinner last week that there was no storage room in our Tel Aviv apartment and that we’ll need to consult with a carpenter to find a solution to this problem,…
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