eg. “He’s about yea(sp?) high.” together with gesture showing the height.
the meaning is obvious from context. i am curious what the actual word is. is it Yiddish or something?
I’m not sure of its origins, but I’ve always seen it spelled out as “yay high”.
This word, with the “yay” spelling (which I expected), and its meaning and etymology is listed in Wiktionary. I’m not sure what it means there by “not comparable”.
I would translate “yay” in this context as “approximately”.
hmm, googled and it appears “yay high” is a US slang dating back to the 1950s according to the OED, but their online dictionary does not contain the phrase.
Only 1950s? :dubious:
I would hazard to guess that it goes back much further than that.
Possibly appeared in a Western of the late 1940s-early 50s? It has that faux-cowboy ring to it and if the OED thinks it’s mid-50s, I’d take that as a valid first approximation.
stab in the dark,
Yea it came to pass = so it came to pass
Yea high = so high
if that’s the case then it is probably pretty ancient in usage
Something can’t be yayer, yayest, less yay, least yay, etc.
DAS is the Dictionary of American Slang.
I’m also surprised that it’s this recent.
Just curious: Why do you think it might be Yiddish?
Because everything that’s not sanskrit or tamil is yiddish.
Google books shows lots of emhatic usage of “yea” (as in “yea, verily”), but notably with lots of variation on “it is time; yea, high time” and “praise; yea, high praise.” So “yea” and “high” were already collocating with each other well before the 1950s. Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang says African-American slang, but not why they suggest that.
Er, why Tamil? How many phrases in common English-speaking use are even related to Tamil ones?
I checked my (printed) copy of the OED, and it cites the Dictionary of American Slang 1960 edition as the first use in print.
I don’t think so. I am pretty sure I have heard “about yay high”. As your Wictionary link says, it actually seems to mean “so” or “this”: It is a demonstrative, always used with a gesture to indicate actual height (or size, length, etc.).
I don’t have an example to give off the top of my head, but it would be surprising if we did not import a few Tamil expressions from the days of the Raj (not to mention subsequent Indian immigration into Britain).
There are a few, mostly food(/plant)-oriented: curry, mango, mulligatawny, patchouli. Also, catamaran, corundum, and pariah. “ginger” may be cognate to Tamil “ingi”. And, of course, there are cases where Tamil borrowed from Sanskrit a word of wider spread (e.g., Tamil has a cognate to English “orange”).
But, in general, there seem to be very few Tamil imports into English (and, as opposed to the indirect connections between Sanskrit (or, more contemporarily, Hindi) and English, there are essentially no significant connections between Tamil and English other than such scattered borrowings, as Tamil is not an Indo-European language).
It was a joke. There are a lot of websites and articles that explain in great and crazy detail how all languages came from Tamil or Sanskrit.
Ah, yeah. Sorry for being thick; that’s actually a pretty good joke.
i chose Yiddish at random. it’s just some exotic language which i’ve not heard before, “Oy vey, i was just yea high when i had my first fisticuffs.”
thanks for checking.