Philologos
By Philologos
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News The Curious Contronym
Dan Mosenkis of Fair Lawn, N.J., writes: A while back there was a contest to find English words which meant both one thing and its opposite; the only ones I remember are “cleave” and “sanction.” It occurs to me, though, that the Hebrew root shakhah. also yields two such words, nishkah., “forgotten,” and shakhiah., “common”…
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Culture Giving One’s Life
There’s a Hebrew term that looks like it’s going to be heard a lot in the coming months. It’s mesirut-nefesh, which means, literally, “giving one’s life,” and, in ordinary language, “devotion” or “giving one’s all.” But for the settlement movement that is now gearing up to fight this summer’s planned disengagement from Gaza, mesirut-nefesh has…
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News Hard-wired Grammar
A perennially debated issue in linguistics in recent decades has been the question of just what aspects of language are “hard-wired” into our brains and what aspects are contingent on chance developments affecting specific languages or groups of languages. Take the basic word order of the simplest sentences that we utter. If you wish to…
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Culture Where Is It Written?
The attractively smiling woman in the black-and-white photograph sits curled on a sofa, looking younger than she tells us she is. She says: “Where is it written that because my hair is gray and I have grandkids, I have to retire? Well, I don’t think so! Oh, sure, I’ll retire someday, I just don’t know…
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News Rice Crowns ‘President Abbas’
Can a 15,000 mile round trip be remembered for a single word? It probably will be in regard to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent visit to Jerusalem and Ramallah, the capital of the P.A. In her two days in the region, the secretary of state, who otherwise talked in the usual platitudes, signaled the…
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News As Old as the Hills
Samuel Jacobs of Massena, N.Y., writes: “Here is a question that I have wondered about for decades. My mother, of blessed memory, was born near the shtetl of Dukshitz, in White Russia, now Belarus, and came to the United States as a young teenager in 1907. What Yiddish I learned was from her. I was…
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News A Brief on Bokser
Last week we observed Tu B’Shvat, the Jewish tree-planting day — or at least it is that in Israel, halfway through whose mild, rainy winter the earth is moist and receptive and the time for planting is ideal. As a boy in a Jewish school in New York, on the other hand, I can remember…
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News A Bad Week For Philologos
It’s been a bad week for a language columnist. First, an overworked and apparently groggy editor at the Forward decided — as many of you have noted, to your shock and/or amusement — to relocate the city of Brussels, mentioned in last week’s column, to Germany. I desperately beg you all to believe that although…
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News No Jews allowed: White supremacists are building a segregated community in Arkansas, but is it legal?
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News What Zohran Mamdani has actually said about Jews, Israel and antisemitism
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