Wex

Nu?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Scandals? Lies? Financial meltdowns? Nu? It’s time to go Yiddish on all that hot air and prick those balloons with the sharpest verbal pin in the language. Roughly translatable as “so?” nu conveys so very much more. In the context of political debate it means: “What you’re saying is either irrelevant or painfully...

Wex

Looking like a beaten out willow twig on Sukkes

Between ritualized gluttony, ritualized fasting, hours and hours of ritual prayer and almost as many hours of trying to sleep in a Succah (often preceded by even more hours of ritual cursing while trying to build the Succah), the average observant Jew looks and feels vi an opgeshlogene heshayne, a beat-out willow twig, by the time Hoshana Rabba rolls around. The idiom is based on one of the plants used as...

Marilla

Michael Wex discusses Haniel Long’s ‘The Marvellous Adventure of Cabeza de Vaca’

The Marvellous Adventure of Cabeza de Vaca by Haniel Long The Afterword is the books blog for Canadian newspaper The National Post. Recently Wex was asked (as were several other Canadian authors) to answer this question: If you could add one book to the high school curriculum – a book which students couldn't graduate with until it was read – what would it be, and why? Wex's choice was The Marvellous...

Wex

Go talk to the wall

Gey, red tsu der vant, “Go, talk to the wall”—Israelis and their enemies alike seem to feel misrepresented by one or another sector of the media, who are toyb vi di vant, “deaf as the wall,” to their particular point of view. The Yiddish wall does so much more than keep the insides of buildings off of streets and lawns. It figures in many idioms, a surprising number of which have to do with...

Wex

The kosher meat industry sheds crocodile tears

Should the federal grand jury currently investigating possible anti-trust violations on the part of certain unnamed kosher meat suppliers uncover evidence of unkosher business practice, I’ll bet dollars to dales—that’s Yiddish for poverty—that we’ll soon see more than one representative of the firms in question weeping tsibele trern, “onion tears,” and adopting a yires-shomayim peniml, “a...