Wex

Jews and dogs

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Hitsl and hintshleger, which both mean “dogcatcher,” are among the most offensive words in a language not usually well-disposed to dogs. Dogs and Jews enjoyed a symbiotic relationship in the old country; the dogs were the predators and Jews were their prey. Although Yiddish is far from canine-positive, the dogcatcher gets...

Wex

Yiddish is not politically correct

Despite, or perhaps because of the number of Yiddish-speakers who use walkers, canes, and wheelchairs, Yiddish has remained stubbornly resistant to efforts to empower the disabled. My father, who had only one leg, saw no irony in screaming kalyekeh or loomer (“cripple”) at cars with disabled stickers on their windows or with using the same words, along with hoyker (“hunchback”–it usually applied...

Wex

Driving in Yiddish – Part 2

Three of the most common and effective epithets hurled at the competition by Yiddish-speaking drivers are yold, shmendrik, and kuneh-leml. Yold (often pronounced yolt when it’s meant to be emphatic), which now means primarily “sap, sucker, dupe” and once in a while, “yokel, rube, hick,” comes from the Hebrew and originally meant “well-born boy, scion of a wealthy family,” whence it developed...

Wex

Driving in Yiddish – Part 1

Henry Ford might have been one large, cuddly bundle of Jew-hatred–he did write the preface to my copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion–but he also helped to enrich the Jewish people with the one thing for which it had been yearning since the publication of the Bove Bukh, a verse epic about a Yiddish-speaking knight: Henry Ford helped give us armor. Not for us the clank of mail as we struggle...

Wex

A barracks should collapse on you

Whenever people find out that I work in Yiddish, they almost inevitably ask me to tell them my favorite Yiddish curse. These days it’s a kazarme zol af dir aynfaln, "a barracks should collapse on you.” Having a building of any kind collapse on top of you is never pleasant, but if that building is a barracks, then you're probably in the army--the last place any East-European Jew wanted to find himself....