Why were Nazis called Nazis? The full name of the party was the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), and you can see in the first word where the “Na” and “zi” come from — just as members of the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei) were called “Sozis.” But there is a more…
Harei at m’kudeshet li b’tabaat zo k’dat Moshe v’Yisrael. Harei atah m’kudash li b’tabaat zo k’dat Moshe v’Yisrael. Behold, you are consecrated for me, with this ring, according to the religion/tradition of Moses and Israel. We memorized these Hebrew vows for weeks, drilling until we could recite them without a hitch when the pressure was…
Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews, also represents a culture that has survived hundreds of years and is still relevant today. And more people need to know about it. Ladino is a pan-Mediterranean language that crosses geographic, linguistic and cultural boundaries. Otherwise known as Judeo-Spanish, Ladino is the hybrid dialect that Jews from the Iberian…
fry on the right track. “Patriarchy is inventive,” she writes. It’s true. It is. So inventive in fact, it keeps finding reasons to dismiss young women’s voices. Vocal fry is just the latest in a long, long series. Naomi Wolf, not for the first time, stands on the side of patriarchy, telling women that they…
Week in and week out, for 24 years, the person known as Philologos has graced our pages with an erudite, engaging and often surprising column about language. About Yiddish, English and Hebrew, French, Polish, Latin and Greek, Aramaic and Circassian and just about any other tongue humans have spoken. Ostensibly, Philologos answered readers questions about…
A newly published book, Norman Berdichevsky’s “Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language,” is an excellent survey of its subject. In just 200 pages, Berdichevsky manages to touch succinctly but informatively on nearly every aspect of Zionism’s successful revival of Hebrew as the spoken language it had not been for two millennia…
I don’t know about you, but being called “chickenshit,” even if it wasn’t by a high White House official, would make my blood pressure rise. Tell me I’m “afraid” to do this or that, and I might disagree or resent it, but it wouldn’t make me want to punch you in the nose. Change that…
Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard, didn’t coin “language maven” (William Safire did, back in the ’70s, to describe himself), but he did more than anyone else to popularize the term. In a 1994 article in The New Republic called “Grammar Puss,” included in his subsequent book “The Language Instinct,” Pinker…
במשך פֿון זיבן יאָר האָט דזשעף לויִס אַוועקגעגעבן צען טויזנט שפּײַזקאַרטלעך.
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