Philologos
By Philologos
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News Roots of the Holocaust
Dr. Arnold Richards of New York has a question concerning a passage in the European-born, American Jewish psychiatrist A. A. Brill’s “The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud” — an anthology of Freud’s major essays, published by Brill in 1938. There, in his introduction, Brill wrote: “Alas! As these pages are going to the printer we…
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Culture Plant Names in Yiddish
‘Di geviksn-velt in yidish,” or, as it is titled in English, “Plant Names in Yiddish,” is a volume of botanical terminology, in part assembled and in part newly coined by Yiddish linguist and scholar Mordkhe Schaechter, that recently has been published by New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. It is both an impressive work…
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News Moments of Revision
Judith Gold Stitzel of Morgantown, W.Va., has an inquiry about the word “phylacteries,” the English term for what Jews call “tefillin” (pronounced “Tfee-LEEN” in Hebrew and “TFI-lin” in Yiddish and English). She writes: “Out of curiosity, I decided to learn more about the word. The Columbia Encyclopedia tells me that it is from a Greek…
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News Mirror Imaging
Throughout their century-old struggle over Palestine — or is it the Land of Israel? — Jews and Arabs often have vied with each other not only for the same land but also for the same words, the same images and the same conceptions of themselves, each side spinning a narrative that has been the upside-down…
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News A Hill of Bupkis
Bert Horwitz writes: “In The Wall Street Journal of July 29, under the headline ‘Inside the World of Corporate Finance and Wall Street,’ I was surprised to read a story that ended by declaring that a search for information had ‘turned up bupkis.’ ‘Bupkis’ is a word that I have been recently hearing, even more…
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Culture Ultra-problematic
‘Thousands of Israeli ultranationalists rallied Tuesday against a Gaza pullout,” began a Reuters news dispatch on Wednesday, August 3. Is this an accurate or a biased description on Reuters’s part? “Ultra” is an odd prefix because it can have either a positive, negative or neutral connotation depending on what word it goes with. On the…
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Culture The Dreaded ‘T-Word’
At least no one can say that someone at the British Broadcasting Corporation, better known as the BBC, isn’t consistent. After being criticized for years for its refusal to use the word “terrorists” to describe those folks who, generally of the Islamic persuasion, make a habit of doing things like flying airplanes into the Twin…
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News Moishe Pupik
Sherry Leffert of Cambridge, Mass., writes: “My friends and I were watching the Yiddish film ‘Amerikaner Shadkhen,’ in which the expression ‘Moishe Pupik’ occurs. We all had heard of him but wondered how the name and expression originated. Can you enlighten us?” I can hazard an educated guess. For the benefit of those readers who…
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: שוועדישע ייִדישיסטן קומען קיין ניו־יאָרק צו פֿאַרזוכן אַן עכטן בייגלVIDEO: Swedish Yiddishists come to NYC to taste an authentic bagel
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