It’s my catchphrase, but I’ve been forced to stop using it since I realized I don’t know how to spell it or what it means…any Teeming Millionths feel like helping this poor fool?
It’s usually transliterated oy vey. It’s a Yiddish phrase that’s used similarly to “Oh, boy!” or “Oh, shit!” in English.
gotcha. Should’ve guessed.
I believe it’s a shortening of “Vey is mir!,” which means, roughly, “That hurts!” Compare German “Das tut mir Weh!” (“That does me pain.”).
O.K., whats the skinny on “Oy Gevalt”?
Leo Rosten, in his The Joys of Yiddish describes oy (more frequently rendered oy!) as a general purpose interjection to intensify the emotion of the subject–and, when used by a person fluent in Yiddish, it can express a complete range of emotions depending on how it is uttered.
Oy! vay! is , literally, “oh! pain!” but it also carries a range of expressions.
Gevalt!, (which Rosten says also must be accompanied by the exclamation point), comes from the German Gewalt “power” or “force” but has the meaning of a cry of surprised fear or terror or a desperate plea for help.
Leo rosten, the Grand Old Man of Yiddish, didn’t bother to cite Oy with the cry of geval(d)t!. He let gevald stand alone.
He gives three meanings for gevald!: “A cry of fear, astonishment, amazement. A cry for help. A desparate expression of protest.”
As to oy!, he describes it as "not a word, but a vocabulary.*
‘Oy Vey’ is pig latin for ‘Voy’.
At least according to someone’s sig line that I recall.
This confirms that simulposts are decided by date of registration. There’s no other explanation.
This confirms that simulposts are decided by date of registration. There’s no other explanation.
My mother, who is fluent in Yiddish, said that “Oy vey is mir” is literally “Oh woe is me.” However, as others have noted, it is used in practice to denote anything from “I have a headache” to “Lord, what dipshits these mortals be” to “not another stinky diaper!!”
It’s useful, that’s for sure.
I’ve said that in a previous thread (and you cheated me of the opportunity to sauy it again!), but it was never a sig line.
Oy is a cry, an exclamation, just like the English Oh!. But it ends with -y because Yiddish has a tendency to diphthongize some of its vowels. Compare Yiddish Moyshe (Moses) where Hebrew has Mosheh.
Vey is the same as German Weh ‘pain’, and is the Germanic cognate of English woe, going back to the Proto-Indo-European root *wai, ‘alas’ (interjection). It also produced the Chaucerian cry wellaway in the Canterbury Tales, and via Old Norse veila, ‘lament’, we got the word wail. (Compare the Arabic word wayl ‘affliction, distress, woe’, used in the Qur’an for the torments of the damned in Hell, and Arabic way, ‘woe! shame!’. Linguists consider such “expressive” words as universals.)
As Theobroma noted, Vey iz mir corresponds exactly to the English sentence “Woe is me.”