Philologos
By Philologos
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News Rag Time
An e-mailer signing off as Shlomo writes: “A recent NPR broadcast (May 27, 2006) on the use of dog hair in cloth noted in passing that the word shmatte derives from a Catalan source. Jews in pre-1492 Spain were prominent in the dog cloth trade, it seems. Is Catalan actually the source of this Yiddish…
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News Linguistic Realignment
It would be nice to think that I’ve changed the course of history. In my column last week, I criticized the widely used term “convergence plan” as a translation of the Hebrew word hitkansut, which is what Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been calling his scheme of a unilateral withdrawal from most of the…
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News Illogical ‘Convergence’
Ehud Olmert has come to Washington to talk about his convergence plan. By now, we all know what that means. But why, oh why, does it mean that? To converge, according to my dictionary, is “to tend toward or approach an intersecting point,” or “to come together from different directions.” What does this have to…
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News You Wicked Son of a Wicked Man!
One can’t help but be tickled by the spectacle of the Satmar Hasidim tearing themselves apart these days in the battle between two brothers, Aaron and Zalman Teitelbaum, to inherit the title of grand rebbe from their father, the late Moses Teitelbaum. The Satmars, said to be the world’s largest Hasidic community, have a long…
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News Some Belated Thoughts About Afikoman
The Passover Seder may be behind us, but reader Saul Newman is still thinking about it. That is, he’s thinking about the afikoman, the piece of matzo hidden away by the head of the family (and stolen for bargaining purposes, if they can find it, by the children at the table), whose shared consumption marks…
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News Za’atar
‘We will,” Ismail Haniyeh, the new, Hamas-nominated prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, announced recently, “eat za’atar, grass, and salt, but we will not give in or renounce our principles.” How long Haniyeh expects his voters to keep going on such a diet is unclear. Not that za’atar isn’t good for you. It has been…
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News Sheygetz
Bernard Adelman from Winthrop, Mass, writes: “How does one derive [the Yiddish plural noun] ‘scotsim’ from [the singular] ‘sheygetz,’ when it seems that ‘scotsim’ would be the plural only of ‘scots’? Sheygetz, of course, is a Yiddish word referring either to a young gentile male, or else to a young Jewish male who behaves like…
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Culture A ‘Matzo’ Mystery
We’re all eating it this week — in some cases, more than we’d like to — but why on earth do we spell it “matzo,” or “matzoh”? What Jew says, or ever did say, “mah-tso,” pronouncing the last syllable to rhyme with “oh” or “glow”? Ashkenazic Jews always have said “MAH-tse,” with the last syllable…
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