Miss Congeniality’s Mishegas
In the category of “Latest Yiddish Word To Find Crossover Appeal,” the March 7 Academy Awards telecast produced a dark-horse winner: mishegas, which roughly translates to “madness or folly.” While introducing this year’s Oscar nominees for cinematography, actress Sandra Bullock — who took this year’s leading actress Oscar for her role in “The Blind Side” — dropped the word to describe the esoteric techniques employed by directors of photography.
Bullock’s Oscar-night Yiddish got a thumbs-up from Yiddishist Michael Wex, author of, most recently, “How To Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck).” “The idea of mishegas as picky details about things that don’t really interest you is, more or less, correct,” he said.
That mishegas would make it into the Oscar spiel of a non-Jewish actress like Bullock is emblematic of “just how much Yiddish has entered the argot of the film business,” Wex said.
Other Hollywood favorites, according to Wex: Chaim Yankel, which is used to mean “a nobody,” “a what’s-his-name,” as in, “We can’t get George Clooney, so get me Chaim Yankel” — and the Yiddish word for “pins and needles,” shpilkes, as in “I’m sitting on shpilkes, waiting to hear from my agent.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
