Philologos
By Philologos
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News How Do You Do’s Novels
Help! Now it’s The New York Times. This is from a Times article last week about the new Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof”: “‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ with music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, is based on ‘Tevye the Milkman,’ a cycle of short stories by Sholem Aleichem published in…
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News Mezinke Madness
Seymour Zimilover and Harry Jaglom have related questions. Mr. Zimilover writes: “We often hear the song ‘Di Mezinke Oysgegebn’ played at weddings where the youngest child of the family is being married. What is a ‘mezinke’ and from what language is the word derived?” And from Mr. Jaglom comes the query: “My father, who was…
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News You Call That a Man?
Marvin Friedman writes from San Francisco: Your recent column about the expression folg mir a gang reminded me of how my mother used to say, in a tone between contempt and sarcasm, “Oykh mir a mentsh,” which I understood to mean something like, “This is also considered a person?” In turn, this brought me to…
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News The Female Divine
Is (the?) Shekhina (Shekinah? Shechinah?) a “she” or an “it”? “The Shekhina is a woman,” Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy is quoted as saying in the latest issue of Moment magazine, in which the article “In Search of Shekhina” deals with Mr. Nimoy’s recently published book of photographs, “Shekhina.” And yet in none of the…
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News Oy!fruf
Bill Morris writes from San Diego: This last weekend I heard someone talking about an “ufruf” (“oof-roof”). In English contexts, I’ve always seen this word given the German spelling of “aufruf,” which should be pronounced “owf-roof,” while in Yiddish it is spelled sextie`, which should be pronounced “oyf-roof.” Are there Yiddish dialects in which the…
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News Pome-Grenade
‘A haunting story about love, language, and loss,” the February 9 issue of The Jerusalem Report calls Israeli-born, Canadian-Jewish author Edeet Ravel’s first novel “Ten Thousand Lovers.” Set in an Israel of disillusionment, a land of sadly lapsed ideals, “Ten Thousand Lovers” (Headline, 2003), the magazine informs us, is a bestseller in Canada and has…
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News Bandanarama
The controversial head-scarf and yarmulke ban in French public schools, the January 20 New York Times informs us, has now spread to bandanas and is threatening Sikh turbans. French education minister Luc Ferry, the newspaper wrote, “told the National Assembly’s legal affairs committee that any girl’s bandana that is considered a religious sign… would also…
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News Come ’Round
Ed Rheingold writes from Evanston, Ill.: Your column of December 19 on the transliteration of the Hebrew letter h.et didn’t mention the word “challah,” but it’s another example of a h.et-word commonly spelled with “ch” in English and almost never with just “h.” “Challah bread” is often found in supermarkets, even where there is little…
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