… which will plug into two topics being developed in my posting queue (which is totally unmanageable in the face of recent events in my life and in the world): rich people, and the death in January of the Princeton philosopher Paul Benacerraf (who was my senior-year adviser in mathematics). I will have a lot more to say about both of these topics in future postings, but today I’ll just give you the zinger.
Archive for the ‘Yiddish’ Category
The Yiddish word for shpilkes
November 17, 2023Melinda Shore on Facebook yesterday, the wry comment “How to spot the NY newspaper”, about this passage that Ann Burlingham had posted on FB:
At Lot 77062, he started to get antsy. “I’m getting shpilkes,” he said, using the Yiddish word for shpilkes. [The paragraph continues: His hope — not unreasonable, he thought — was somewhere in the high six figures.]
To supply the context (thanks to Season Devereux for pointing me to this): it’s a New York Times article by John Leland: on-line on 11/15/23 with the headline “He Thought His Chuck Close Painting Was Worth $10 Million. Not Quite: A bittersweet ending for Mark Herman, the dog walker who was given the painting: It finally sold, but for far less than he had envisioned”: in print with the headline “Gavel Comes Down on a Chuck Close Nude and a Fantasy”.
New Yorker Mark Herman was the speaker of using the Yiddish word for shpilkes; why he didn’t say using the Yiddish word for pins and needles is something of a mystery to me — but if you can’t easily pull up the English idiom pins and needles ‘anxiety’, then Yiddish shpilkes might be all you’ve got.
bibulous (paper towels and sots)
June 1, 2023🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for the 1st of June (ushering in the summer months — and Pride Month, for which even the rabbits go gay: 🏳️🌈 🏳️🌈 🏳️🌈)
Today’s amuse-gueule for the month is a Zippy strip (which has been hanging around on my desktop since it appeared in 10/14/19) in which the notoriously onomastomanic Zippy savors the word bibulous for the delights of its meaning a well as its pronunciation:
From NOAD: adj, bibulous: formal excessively fond of drinking alcohol. ORIGIN late 17th century (in the sense ‘absorbent’): from Latin bibulus ‘freely or readily drinking’ (from bibere ‘to drink’) + –ous.
So we’ve got a specialization of drinking up to drinking alcohol; plus a metaphorical view of drinking up to refer to absorbency (paper towels drink up spills) — but the (older) ‘absorbent’ sense of bibulous is now obsolete. Never mind: Zippy loves it.
Oh yes, also from NOAD (with Zippy, but not with Griffy’s further specialization in the strip, which is not in anybody’s dictionary):
adj. verklempt: North American informal [AZ: in Yinglish] overcome with emotion: I found myself getting a little verklempt just thinking about it | he was standing at the top of the steps looking verklempt.
You can certainly be verklempt over the meanings of words, but it doesn’t follow that verklemt, the Yiddish English adjective, means ‘overcome with emotion about the meanings of words’; verklemt, the Yiddish English adjective, is (off the shelf) neutral, unspecified, uncommitted as to the cause of this extreme emotion, which could be any of an endless number of things. Once off the shelf, you can do all sorts of things with it.
Don’t ask! 2
May 25, 2023A Peanuts strip, featuring Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty:
(#1) But wait! Patty’s Don’t ask! is not a request for Charlie not to ask about her feelings (which would directly contradict her requesting Charlie to ask about her feelings); instead, it’s an exclamation (in Yiddish English) conveying Patty’s dismay at feeling really crappy
We have been through this use of Don’t ask! previously on this blog, in the aptly named posting of 1/31/21, “Don’t ask!”:
Follow-up: a regular genius
February 21, 2022It starts with my 2/19/22 posting “A regular genius”, on quintessential regular (NOAD example: this place is a regular fisherman’s paradise), vs. run-of-the-mill regular (NOAD example: it’s richer than regular pasta).
Which elicited this Facebook comment from Joel Levin:
I get a sarcastic note from he’s a regular genius, in that one might so describe a person who had done something particularly doltish. I thought I might see a mention of that sense in the column.
And then AZ > JL:
In some contexts I get that note too, but I think that’s just an example of the generalization that any compliment can be used sarcastically, not a fact specifically about regular.
And then a comment from Ben Yagoda, making the Jewish connection: it’s probably relevant that JL’s Jewish and I’m, so to speak, Jewish-adjacent; we’re more inclined than a random person to detect a sarcastic or ironic tone in he’s a regular genius. The tone is available for anyone to pick up, but some of us are predisposed to detect it (and to convey it in our own speech).
Nobody expects the Yinglish interjection
September 29, 2021An e-mail exchange on 9/28 between Richard Vytniorgu and me, thinking out loud together on various topics, including the prejudice within the LGBT community against the twinkish, the sexually receptive, the submissive, and the effeminate amongst us queers — all, apparently, on the grounds that such men are wanting in conventional masculinity and so are defective even as queers; they’re just too gay-acting, in the view of some of our number. Richard is an effeminate submissive sexually receptive twink, so he’s got a huge emotional investment in the matter; I am merely a bottom by preference, but I’ve been becoming increasingly militant and outspoken in this arena, moving towards the view that Richard and his kind should be seen as central to the larger community, not as peripheral misfits.
But that’s not what I’m after in *this* posting. Instead, it’s what happened in this exchange between us:
RV: I feel for Tannor [Reed] as I do for all twinks in the [gay porn] industry. Gays can be so hypocritical sometimes: they love to watch us, but will publicly punish or shame us when it suits them. You may have heard of [twink X; his story isn’t the point here, just his being treated with contempt]
AZ: Oi.
RV: What does this mean?
Here’s where I need to remind you that Richard is British and I am American.
Don’t ask!
January 31, 2021Today’s morning name, but it comes with crucial context. The Don’t ask! in question is not the neutral use of the negative imperative, advising the addressee not to ask someone about something (Don’t ask them about the ducks in the kitchen; that just makes them crazy), but instead is a formula of Yiddish-influenced English, normally used only by (American) Jews (or gentiles culturally close to this community), when someone has in fact just asked about the matter in question (the tsuris / tsores ‘troubles’); the speaker doesn’t go on to avoid this sensitive matter, but instead embraces it, launching into kvetching ‘complaining’ about it.
The formula Don’t ask! then serves as an announcement — a kind of alarm bell, if you will — that the speaker is about to go off on a (perhaps extended) kvetch.