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Born To Kvetch. You probably already know -- and maybe already use -- Yiddish words like "schlep," "schmear" and the ever-popular "schmuck," but if you really want to harness the power of Yiddish, you need to learn phrases like "a viste pgire af dir," as relayed in a New York Times book review by William Grimes (9/29/05). The phrase literally translates into, "a dismal animal death on you." But the real punch is in what that means figuratively. As Michael Wex, author of "Born To Kvetch" explains, it really means "you should spend the rest of your tiny life in a Colorado feedlot, then be herded off to some nonunion slaughterhouse to be turned, painfully, into fast-food burgers for one of the less prominent chains."
"Yiddish," notes William Grimes, "is rich in curses that, at their best, leave just enough to the imagination to keep the recipient tossing and turning at night, poring over possible implications." As Michael Wex explains: "It isn't a matter of yelling out bad words; the trick is to put good ones together in the most damaging possible way." Maybe you knew this, too, but, The Three Stooges used Yiddish all the time. There's a scene where Larry says to Moe (who is headed to a hock shop): "While you're there, hock me a tshaynik." It's a pun -- a reference to the phrase: "Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik," literally meaning "Don't knock me a teakettle." What it really means is, "you don't have to shut up completely, but I'd really appreciate it if you'd stop rattling on about the same damned thing all the time."
Yiddish "is the language par excellence of complaint," evolving as it did "over centuries of persecution and transience." As Michael Wex puts it, Yiddish is "the national language of nowhere ... Judaism is defined by exile," he says, "and exile without complaint is tourism." In addition, the "Jews who transmuted German into Yiddish were steeped in Jewish law," and as a result "Yiddish thrives on argument, hairsplitting and arcane points of law and proper behavior." So much so that the language itself is often in dispute to a point where "you can't open your mouth without finding out that, no matter what you're saying, you're saying it wrong." At which point someone calls you "shtik fleysh mit oygn" ("a piece of meat with eyes") and all you can do is "lakhn mit yashtsherkes" ("laugh with the lizards") -- that is, "the kind of laughter that keeps you from crying."
Tim Manners
editor
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©2005 reveries.com |
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