The Vortsman isn't
sure whether the uptick in queries this past month was due to his
kvetsh about the
sparseness of his in-box or the penitential mood of recent days, but he's had
both (the Yiddish one and the English one) hands full. Good!
A
zeyde's (grandfather's)
pride takes precedence, of course. The Vortsman's
eynikl (grandchild,
there's no gender-specific term in Yiddish) encountered a Yiddish word on
dictionary.com's Word of the Day and asked if it had been properly
transliterated. The entry read: "tchotchke \CHOCH-kuh\, noun: A
trinket; a knickknack."
To which her
zeyde fondly, if
didactically, replied:
"You asked, so
you're gonna get the full lecture: Under the Standard for Yiddish
transliteration, it should be spelled:
tshatshke.
"The term, as
defined, actually comes from
tsatske, which means a trinket,
toy, plaything, ornament, and also came to be applied to a spoiled young woman.
The version with the 'tsh' sounds reflects the Southern Yiddish dialect
(Poland, mostly) while the one with the 'ts' is the Northern (Lithuanian, or
Litvak) pronunciation. Since Southern Yiddish speakers predominated in the U.S.
immigration, theirs was the form taken over into English."
Here's a quickie.
A reader asks about her father's frequent saying,
a dayge, nu. The phrase
translates directly as "a worry, well." The true translation(s): "no big
worry"..."no big deal"...or, to demonstrate how English matches Yiddish in its
sarcastic contrariness, "big deal!"
Another reader
fires off a double-barrel query:
"1) In the movie Hester Street, there was a
character who...was deriding the main female lead, (calling her)...a 'Polisher
dripka.' (I think it's used) to describe someone who's made of stern stuff, or
someone who stands up for herself. Is dripka really a Yiddish word?
"2) My grandmother
had a saying something like 'Macht mir nicht un chinik' which I think loosely
translated to 'Don't throw a tea kettle at me.'"
oy, az
okh un vey
-- oh! alas and woe! A
dripke (note spelling correction) is hardly the
paragon our reader assumes: she's actually "a slob, a slattern." The character
in "Hester Street" added ethnic injury to insult by calling Our Heroine a
poylishe (note gender and
spelling correction) i.e., a Polish, slob.
And, to highlight
in flaming letters the dangers of relying on treacherous memory and Germanic
"Yiddish," the reader's grandma actually used the old saw:
hak mir
nit keyn tshaynik, which means, of course, "don't bang on my teakettle." As
protesters in Latin America have shown, banging on metal cookware makes a loud
noise but does not replace rational discourse. Thus, the Congresspeople
assaulted this summer might have aptly replied with
grandma's actual saying.
Another reader
asks whether her mother's use of the term "bondit" for a mischievous little boy
is gender-specific.
bandit (note spelling correction) is masculine
and applies both to its English cognate and to its more humorous usage. In the
one thousand years in which both Yiddish and English evolved, little girls were
assumed to be decorous and women were expected to be law-abiding. Thus, English
must modify the term as "female bandit" and Yiddish would have to create
bandit'ke
(fem.)
for a female scapegrace.
Keep 'em comin'!
BUT, puh-leez! Before you do, consult
The Vortsman's Guide To Writing Yiddish in English Letters. It's in the
July, 2009 YidBits and, if there's room, it's
repeated below. (Hey, Editor, maybe we could make
the Guide a permanent
feature? Just askin'.) [Ed. note: If there's room? There's more Vortsman than yidbits this month! Nonetheless, in a generous sweep of editing, THE GUIDE is linked three times above, and will,
a dayge, nu, forevermore be linked in the text below.]
_ _ _ _ _
Have a question for the Vortsman? Send him an
email and ask the meaning of a favorite, or confusing, word or phrase. (For help with writing Yiddish in English letters, consult the
Vortsman's Guide.)
Thursday, October 15 
