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…
One of the more surprising things about the war in Gaza is the fact that most Israelis still don’t call it a “war.” In Israeli media, the war is largely referred to as mivtza, which translates as “operation” but is rarely used to mean that in vernacular Hebrew. Outside of referring to military actions, the…
A group of right-wing Israeli lawmakers are proposing a bill to make Hebrew the sole official language of the state of Israel. The bill, which has the support of Knesset members from the Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, and Jewish Home parties, would break from current law, which mandates that Arabic as well as Hebrew must be…
Irving Salzman has a question about an ancient Hebrew prayer, the answer to which involves some fine points of linguistic history that may not interest everyone. Yet since the prayer is one that all of you who are synagogue-goers know and may have wondered about, too, I’ll risk discussing it. The prayer begins with the…
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