"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!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... Read more here
In November 2005 Wex appeared on Michael Feldman's PBS radio show Whad'Ya Know? to talk about Yiddish and Born to Kvetch.
It's a really fun interview - the audience and Michael Feldman yuk it up as Wex talks about kvetching, the origins of Yiddish, speaking German that Germans can't understand, Yiddish expressions for bullshit, jokes in the Bible, reciprocal cursing, Hitler's finger, humour in the old... Read more here
The Dapper Dans
Now that Shavues has put an end to the enforced sobriety of the omer period, my relatives––many of whom still dress in leisure suits designed in eighteenth century Poland-–are getting their glad rags out of mothballs in preparation for Jewish wedding season.
A man who is overdressed for any occasion, let alone the one at which he finds himself, is said to oyszen vi an almen nokh... Read more here
In anticipation of Shavuos, my favorite Yiddish idiom this week is blaybn af der milkhiker bank, “to stay [be left] on the dairy bench.” A bank, literally “bench,” was what would now be called a counter or food preparation area, and every kosher home had both a milkhike and a fleyshike bank.
To be left on the dairy bench is to be shut out of something, unjustly excluded on the basis of a very... Read more here
I received an e-mail recently from a reader who says, “My parents both came from Russia and I grew up in Brooklyn. I spoke nothing but Yiddish at home and I like to think that I can still speak it pretty well. My question is about the word schlock. I know what it means in English”––Webster’s defines it as “of low quality or value” and the reader is puzzled as to how it derives from the... Read more here
The response to the New York Times' weekend Yiddish question and answer competition on Ben Schott's vocabulary blog was unprecedented.
451 comments were left on the page A Bissel Yiddish?. Wex tells me that 451 is the gematria of tanna, a mishnaic sage. Unless the Mishna itself is the subject of discussion, the word, however, generally means idiot in Yiddish.
After much sifting, discussing and editing... Read more here
Spotted at Borders (57th St. and Park Avenue) - thanks to Dan Peck for sending this to us.
Read more here
