After the first Vortsman column appeared (about lakhn mit yashtsherkes, in which the V-man opined that yashtsherke was derived from Russian, we received the following comment from Dr. Paul (Hershl) Glasser of YIVO, where he's Senior Research Associate in the Yiddish Language:


The Vortsman is flattered that his first venture into linguistic punditry has been gently corrected by no less an expert than Dr. Glasser. (I gotta get me a Polish-English dictionary!)

Now, on to even riskier ground:



"My dad's Yiddish is full of words his mother made up," writes Joanna Rubiner, then challenges me to explain the term she remembers as asheem bloody, meaning to destroy, as in "Boy, you sure made asheem bloody out of that piece of pie."

That would seem an almost impossible task -- explaining a made-up, supposedly "Yiddish" term -- but the vortsman has already demonstrated how eagerly he can dash in where angels tread lightly.

My (somewhat) wild guess would be that Joanna or her dad had somehow misheard the Yiddish term makhn ash un porekh - to make ash and dust (of something) i.e., to destroy it. It's not hard to hear the echo of ash un in asheem...the transition from porekh to bloody is, admittedly, trickier, but there's a Yiddish folk-expression that covers such a situation:


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