More Yiddish Pondering...

[gnomi]

or, Don't Worry about Me, I'll Just Sit Here in the Dark with My Vocabulary

Yesterday's poll included the following words that some people weren't familiar with:

Schmatte = rag. Can also be used to refer to what I think of as "loaf around the house" clothing and the like. For example, "I was in my pajamas when the doorbell rang, so I just grabbed a random schmatte and tossed it on so I was decent for the UPS guy."

Mishpoche = family. Can be family in the non-biological sense as well. When we attended the 85th birthday party of one of mabfan's cousins, everyone was putting on their name badges how they fit into the overall scheme of the gathering. Having no desire to completely draw out the relationship (mabfan's great² grandfather was Ernie's great grandfather), I annotated mine with "mishpoche."

Narrishkeit = foolishness.

Tsuris = trouble. Covers everything from illness and tragedy to computer malfunction.

Then there were the other words from Yiddish that folks said they use regularly as English (where more than one person mentioned it, I credit to the first mentioner) (glosses in parentheses all my interpretations):

From tygerseye: megilla (long story), oy vey (an interjection denoting a problem), mentsch (a good person), schmutz (dirt, filth), schmaltz (excessive sentimentality)

From docorion: schmuck (an obscenity, though most folks don't realize just how vulgar it is in Yiddish), mishegas (craziness), meshugge (crazy)

From seborn: yenta (busybody, matchmaker)

From doeeyedbunny: schvitz (to sweat), nebbish (a nobody), kvetch (to complain)

On a related topic, a while ago I discovered that MS Word considers the following words sufficiently mainstream English that the spell check doesn't consider them misspelled:

Pesach
Chutzpah
Klutz
Hadassah
Shabbat
Abba
Schlep

Comments

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

I didn't remember anyone mentioning it yesterday (though it's possible I missed it). But it's another popular one that is an obscenity but most people don't realize just how vulgar it is.

[betra.livejournal.com]

I use it a lot. I just forgot to put it in there, sorry. LOL You know, the wonderful thing is that a lot of perfectly fine Yiddish words sound naughty and insulting if delivered correctly.

[madfilkentist]

Language analogy would have led me astray there. "Putz" is one of the cleanest words in German. "Putzfrau" means "cleaning woman."

[zsero.livejournal.com]

That's the difference between German 'u' and North American 'u', which is more like the UK 'o'. In Yiddish "Putzn" as a verb, sounding like "he puts it down", means to polish. The vulgar word for "penis", I would transliterate as "potz", pronounced as in "pots and pans" in the UK or Oz, but in the USA it would be pronounced as in "he putts on the green".