"His books have not just been good for the Jews; they have been great." – Joel Yanofsky, Literary Review of Canada
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Serious cursing, with no underlying spirit of fun, includes expressions such as yemakh shmoy, “may his name be blotted out”, a phrase as deadly serious as Yiddish gets. It isn't cute or funny or terribly memorable in translation; it isn't an insult or an expression of distaste or impatience. It's a real curse, and... 
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Human anatomy receives considerable attention in Yiddish cursing and, just like leprosy, Yiddish curses cover the whole body from the ground up:
fardreyen zolstu mit di fis--may your feet be twisted
krikhn zolstu afn boykh--may you crawl on your belly
zol dir platsn di gal--may your gall-bladder burst
zol dir dreyen farn nopl--may you be turned around by the navel... 
"You should own a thousand houses, with a thousand rooms in each house, and a thousand beds in every room. And you should sleep each night in a different bed, in a different room, in a different house, and get up every morning, and go down a different staircase, and get into a different car, driven by a different chauffeur, who should drive you to a different doctor --and he shouldn't know what's... 
When two Yiddish speakers confront each other as adversaries, the Yiddish equivalents of “drop”, “get”, and “screw” will be nowhere in evidence. In a culture defined by dissatisfaction and debate, even vengeance turns into an argument, an escalating series of “Oh, yeahs?” in which either party threatens the other with things over which neither has any control:
Berl: A beyzer gzar zol... 
Using Yiddish curses effectively isn’t a matter of yelling out bad words; the trick is to put good ones together in the most damaging possible way. It’s a pastime, an invitation to a dialogue, a form of recreation that lets standard Yiddish thought and speech run wild.
Many curses involve a reversal of fortune; the curse starts out sounding like a blessing – everything looks just ducky until you get... 