Philologos
By Philologos
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News Scooping Up Satisfaction
This letter comes from Esther Tabak: “I have to ask you about an expression I grew up with: ‘sheb nakhes,’ which refers to the nakhes or satisfaction we get from life’s gifts, such as the pleasures associated with children and grandchildren. No matter what area of the world a Yiddish speaker comes from, every one…
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News Interest and Usury
Reader Ed Morrow writes in an e-mail: “The recent U.S. Senate battle over a new personal bankruptcy law got me thinking about interest and usury. In Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, there are explicit prohibitions on making a profit on loans. There are two different Hebrew words used to describe such a profit, neshekh and tarbit….
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News The Piercer and the Pierced?
Robert Milch of Stony Brook, N.Y., inquires: “In an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on June 19, a Christian minister is quoted as saying: ‘The Hebrew words for male and female are actually the words for the male and female genital parts. The male is the piercer; the female is the pierced.’…
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News Is It Kosher?
abbi Jonathan Gerard of Easton, Pa., writes: “One often hears Americans using the term ‘kosher.’ Hearing it on National Public Radio recently prompted me to wonder what the speaker actually meant by it. In Hebrew it means ‘fit; proper; according to [Jewish] law.’ Could it be that in English the term is used in the…
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News Judaicide
Allan Mallenbaum of Plainview, N.Y., writes: “I’ve seen no word that can be used for the phenomenon of suicidal terrorists who target Jews exclusively. It’s unfortunate, outrageous, that we need such a term, but reality dictates the needs of expression. “Judicide, parallel to suicide, would seem a good choice, but could be misinterpreted to mean…
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News Mene Mene Mystery
Writing about the coming Israeli disengagement from Gaza in The New York Times on May 1, correspondent Steven Erlanger predicts that after the Gaza evacuation will come the turn of settlers on the West Bank. The latter, he writes, “see the writing on the wall — ‘mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,’ in the mysterious Aramaic phrase,…
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News Stop! (In the Name of Accuracy)
‘HOLY SHIITE: Newsweek Retracts Its Deadly Toilet Tale,” was the headline of the May 17 New York Post. This pun of questionable taste, which was not calculated to further endear the American media to Muslim readers, was made possible by the aversion that most English speakers have to what linguists call a glottal stop —…
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News A Curious Case
Usually, the Speaker of the Knesset’s opening address commencing Israeli Independence Day, given at the ceremony at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, is a pretty dull series of clichés: “In this —th year of our independence, we take pride in our achievements and look forward to the future with hope,” etc., etc. This year, however, it…
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