Philologos
By Philologos
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News The Thousand Days’ War
What will historians in the future call the nearly three years of daily violence between Palestinians and Israelis that have — for the moment — just ended? That may depend on whether or not the cease-fire that has been declared becomes permanent. If it does, a strong contender is a name that did not exist…
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News A Shayle About Shayle
Reader Paul Malevitz of Los Angeles has a shayle about the word shayle. He writes:In the Yiddish spoken in the territories of the former USSR, northeastern Poland and most of Rumania, we pronounce the words for “meat and bones” as fleysh un/in beyner [“ey” being the linguistic notation for the vowel in a word like…
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News LanLanguage of the H.erem
Reader Leon G. Goldstein writes: “I’m quite familiar with the Yiddish expression freg mir bekheyrem. But what is the source of it? Is it related to the Hebrew h.erem, meaning excommunication?” The kheyrem of freg mir bekheyrem, an expression that means “I have no idea” or “I haven’t a clue,” is indeed the same word…
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News Get Thee to a Seminary!
Catching my eye on the front page of the June 10 International Herald Tribune was the following paragraph in an article on the Sharon government’s dismantling of “unauthorized outposts” in the territories: “The Bible says God gave us this country as the homeland for Jews — it is all Israel,” said Amichai Hadad, 22, a…
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News Occupying Verses
The latest Hebrew word to become a media hit is kibush. Writing, for example, in the June 2 New York Times about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s widely reported May 26 speech to the Knesset’s Likud faction, the Times’ Israel correspondent James Bennet wrote: A careful man, [Sharon] used the word ‘occupation’ [in regard to Israel’s…
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News It’s Not Easy Being Green
Annabelle Weiss of Shaker Heights, Ohio, writes to ask: “Can you shed some light on the term ‘greenhorn’? Where did it originate? How did it come to be applied to new immigrants? Did it specifically refer to Jewish immigrants or had it also been applied to earlier waves of immigrants like the Irish?” Weiss is…
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News No, Really
Writing in a recent column in The New Republic on the supposed linkage between the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, remarks that “these issues have literally nothing to do with each other.” Although he is entitled to his judgment, the widespread use of the word “literally” in contemporary…
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News A Thorn in One’s Side
The Israeli government, so Defense Minister Shaul Mufaz was recently quoted by newspapers as saying, intends to hold the new Palestinian Authority leadership accountable for fighting terror al kotso shel yod, “to the tip of a yod.” This is a fine old Hebrew expression with an interesting history. If you look carefully at the printed…
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