A reader identified as “JA” wants to know: “Does the English word ‘slug,’ as in to slug someone, come from Yiddish shlogn, to hit? They certainly sound very similar.” My thinking about this went through three stages. Stage 1, my immediate reaction, was that “slug” and shlogn — or shlugn, in the Yiddish some of…
Two headlines dominated a page of The Marker, the economic section of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, on January 29. The first, captioning a straight news item, read (in my English translation): “Hershkovitz Stuns Finance Ministry: Fires Deputy.” The second, introducing a commentary on this development by correspondent Nehemia Strassler, declared: “Instead of Tackling Problems —…
What or who is a Schmuck anyway?
When does a word borrowed from another language officially become a member in good standing of American English? Some might say that this happens only when it is included in the dictionaries. Yet new dictionaries are not published every day, and even when they come out, they often overlook words that have been regarded for…
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