"I don't want a niche – I want an empire!" – Michael Wex, Globe and Mail
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.
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The idea crops up periodically, generally on Passover, when the khomets-starved brains of certain West Coast executives––addled, some say, by a surfeit of matzoh-brei––go into overdrive and begin to smell money where the rest of us see nothing but Nyafat: “Why don’t we do a Jewish version of The Godfather?”
I can think of a thousand reasons why not, none of which stopped a reasonably... Read more here
Today on the New York Times Ben Schott's Vocab Blog is tackling Yiddish.
And Wex is the moderator! At the time of writing (less than 24 hours after the blog went live) there are over 380 comments where readers have asked questions, answered questions and added their voice. Who said Yiddish is dead? So go to this page on the New York Times website to add your voice to the question and answer... Read more here
