PS: tsirrus which is particularly aggravating is gehakten tsirrus which taken literally means your troubles are chopped.
Meshugais = craziness (the noun form related to meshugena). My parents NEVER tire of the “Michigan Meshugais” joke.
drek or less popularly chazzurai – both mean “crap” in the sense of something shoddy. "Steven Speilberg used to be pretty good but lately all his movies are drek. "
When you want a little bit of something you ask for a schtickle or, for things not easily broken into pieces, a bissel. (Choosing between Schtickle and Bissel for various foodstuffs is a popular topic of conversation around the holidays) “I’m not hungry for breakfast… but maybe just a schtickle of that pumpkin pie…”
How about punim (face).
One might have a farbissena punim (sourpuss)
or a shayna punim (pretty face).
You might tell a maidela (little girl) in your mishpochah (family) that she has a shayna punim.
Good Yiddish words that don’t have direct English translations: Fumfeh: To stumble during speach (umm… ahh…) Zhahlevah: To take less than your share so that more is left for other. This is frequently used as a negative imperative in my grandparents’ house. NB that I have spelled it phonetically as they pronounce it; I make no claims regarding its accuracy. Machatunim: The your child’s parents-in-law.
Some origins:
Tzuris comes from the Hebrew for rock (tzur)
Goy comes directly from the Hebrew word for nation
Bubbeh meintzah means “Grandmother’s tales”
I think schmuck comes from a German word meaning jewel (or maybe that’s putz, I’m not sure)
Phrases: Gey cachin afen yam - “Get out of here” lit. “Go deficate on the ocean” Hochkt mir nicht con chinek - “Quit bothering me” lit. “Don’t bang on my teakettle” (An exceedingly useful phrase for anyone with small children. Often heard in my house growing up)
As I got older I noticed the number of Yiddish or Hebrew words the Three Stooges used. (Except for Joe DeRita, the “Curly Joe” of the feature films, all the Stooges were Jewish.) In one short, where they try to return a baby they thought was abandoned (and the police think the Stooges kidnapped the kid), the cop (Bud Jamison) asks Larry, in Chinese clothes, “An’ what part of China would you be from?”
Larry answered, “Huck mir nisht a chynik, and I don’t mean efsher.”
Moe explained, speaking in a Chinese accent, “Him from China–east side…”
My maternal grandmother wasn’t really a native speaker of Yiddish, but her parents had been, and she grew up in a heavily Jewish section of Brooklyn in the 20s. I don’t know if she could have held whole conversations in Yiddish, especially by the time I knew her, but she had a fair amount of words and phrases she’d sprinkle into English conversation. My grandfather also had some knowledge of Yiddish, but he seemed to use it less. I’ve forgotten most of the words she used, but there’s one phrase that has stuck with me. When I used to visit I’d play gin rummy with her, and if she felt I was taking too long studying my cards she would always say shayna genug (I think that’s the right spelling). Literally it seems to translate as “pretty enough”, but I’ve been told that idiomatically it means something like “enough already”.
Yiddish is basically German slang, mostly spoken by Eastern European Jews. Some of my older relatives speak it, yet I don’t knwo much about it. Unlike many other languages, it doesn’t focus on grammar and words but consists of mostly idioms.
Well, it’s not slang, even though Yiddish has slang. You can either call it a dialect of German, or its own language, but it does have specific grammar, for example.
I think that, because generally now, Yiddish isn’t a primary language in America, but instead Yiddish words and phrases are used with English, people tend to downplay it as a language. However, Yiddish has been the first, and sometimes, only language spoken by people, and it works the same as any other language. You can have conversations in Yiddish, literature has been written in Yiddish, etc.
<b>blueapple</b> I have to agree with <b>Captain Amazing</b>. Yiddish IS a full language which is generally considered a dialect of Middle High German and has been around at least since the 12th Century. Back in the day when there were many more native speakers alive, there was a daily Yiddish newspaper in New York. My grandparents were devotees of the Yiddish theater scene there. My dad got a whole bunch of kooky CDs of Yiddish radio programs this year. My point is, Yiddish is a fully formed language and is not a “slang” or shorthand way of talking. Some info on Yiddish: http://fas-digiclass.rutgers.edu/page.jsp?dept=yiddish
and also: http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0853078.html
Another angle on this: I used to be a volunteer at a family-law clinic in Los Angeles called Levitt & Quinn. There were then, and probably still are, a number of Jewish people working there. One was a man maned Bill, who had installed a fax machine and now put a sign on it complaining about people in the office pulling the paper out in such a way that the machine was not operating properly. The sentence:
“I’ve corrected this problem several times, and whoever is causing this tsurris better get the message!”
The late sports announcer Jim Healey (who called Stu Nahan “Silvertip Stu” and Chick Hearn “Chickieburger”) used “tzuris” too; in referring to Pete Rose, he used the phrase “Rose’s gambling tzuris.”
I wonder if the name of 60s Reds pitcher John Tsitouris is related to this…
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that also a word sometimes used to address a friend, analagous to “buddy”, “old chap” or “homes”? If I’m right, I think it’s a matter of changing the inflection of first vowel just a bit.
No, Rilchiam, not quite. “Bubbe” (pronounced to rhyme with “bubbly”) means “grandmother” and that’s what I called mine. “Zayde” (pronounced ZAY-da) is “grandfather”. I didn’t know until I left Philadelphia at age 8 that other American kids didn’t all call their grandparents Bubbe & Zayde.
“Bubbe” (pronounced to rhyme with book-y) is short for “Bubbele” which means “little grandma” and is an endearment for little girls. My dad used to call me that. (I miss him) Leo Rosten, in “The Joys of Yiddish” I think, said that this is from an old superstitious custom of calling your little kids “lil’ granma” and “lil’ granpa” to put the Angel of Death off their trail.
By the way, I used to get my mouth washed out with soap (and I used Phisohex then—yuck) if I said “putz”, but “schmuck” was OK. They both mean “penis” but calling someone a “putz” is more like calling them a dick, and calling someone a “schmuck” (or shmo, the politer version) is like calling them a wiener. Note that “dick” and “wiener” both mean penis, but one is much more insulting.
Oh, okay. So I was right about the pronunciation! I thought it was an all-purpose term, because I’d heard of parents saying it to their children, as you describe, but I’d also heard of men saying it to each other when they wanted to be a nudjh.
Hey, is that a real term? A variation on nudnik? My family’s not Jewish, but we do use the term, with an accompanying gesture of an elbow “nudging” someone’s ribs, to describe someone who’s deliberately getting on your nerves.
Yup. A “nudge” is a nag. A “nudnik” is, I guess, a loser. Don’t ask me why Yiddish is such a rich language in terms for different sorts of losers and jerks, but it is.
On further reflection, I retract this. There are actually two Hebrew words, one meaning pain and the other meaning troubles, as the Yiddish does. When I posted this I was thinking they wee related, but I don’t think they actually are. So Tsuris is basically a Hebrew word meaning troubles.
I disagree about nudnik - it does not mean specifically loser. More like someone who is an annoying pest with a focus on minutia. Something like the English “anal”.
Shlimazal is an unlucky person, not a disorganized mess.
BTW, the pronunciation of all these words is heavily dependent on country of origin. Yiddish was spoken across the entire European continent and Russia, and varied based on the local language spoken. In general, the Polish/Hungarian speakers would say “tsooris” and “boobah”, while the Lithuanian and Russian speakers would say “tsuris” and “bubbah” (rhyming with “cup”). OTOH, the Lithuanina/Russian “oo” sound (“chutzpah”) would become an “ee” in Polish/Hungarian. Also, the Lithuanina/Russian “ay” sound (e.g. shayna) is “eiy” (rhyming somewhat with “guy”) in Polish/Hungarian.
