“Doss”. Rhymes with “moss”. Plural: “Dossim”. From the Ashkenazic pronunciation of “Dat”, the Hebrew word for religion.
Hey, you asked.
I remember asking Jewish (observant but not Orthodox) about the word shaygetz. I asked because I wanted to know how likely it was I’d be called one; they made it plain that they considered anyone who used the term low class. I’ve been married to a Jewish woman for almost 25 years and haven’t been called one yet.
I recall the terms shaygetz and shiksa used when I was a kid. They seemed to be merely descriptive terms, not pejorative.
I heard shiksa ( שיקסע ) for years without having any idea that it was considered derogatory. They used it a lot on The Nanny, but I don’t remember the context.
Am I correct in believing that goy ( גוי) for a male gentile and goye ( גויה) for a female gentile are considered to be neutral terms?
I have never heard anyone say it, though as I said I don’t speak Yiddish. But the above Webster link does say it is “often disparaging” even in English. IMO seems hard to get past the literal meaning when you are calling people ‘filth’.
In Hebrew this word simply means “nation, body of people” [hence by extension, Gentiles], as in “כל גויי הארץ” = "all the nations of the earth. Seems pretty neutral. But the question is really how it is perceived in Yiddish.
For anyone interested in Yiddish, I highly recommend the works of Michael Wex.
He says that goy has “overtones of stupidity and viciousness”, and the most neutral term for Gentile would be “Orel”, which means “foreskinned one”.
I agree that in contemporary Jewish usage the word isn’t necessarily pejorative.
This is another case where the use of a word among Jewish Americans who don’t really speak Yiddish and don’t view themselves as being qualitatively different from their gentile neighbors has evolved to be more neutral than it was in actual Yiddish. The people who still speak Yiddish today are ultra-Orthodox Jews who, truth be told, rarely have any need for a non-pejorative word for “gentile”.
Thanks for that information @Thing.Fish. It’s a good explanation for how the word is not used in a derogatory way.
If someone said to me “You are filth”, of course I’d feel insulted. Now suppose someone said to me “You are a karinkadink”, and then someone else laughed and said “I’m a karinkadink too”, And someone else said proudly “I married a karinkadink”. Even if that first person called me a karinkadink with an insulting tone, the responses of others would clue me in that ‘karinkadink’ is a word that can be used as an insult but doesn’t need to be taken that way.
‘Karinkadink’ might turn out to mean ‘filth’ in some other language, or maybe it’s just idiomatic and it literally means ‘innkeeper’ but in use it means ‘asshole’ or something like that. Why would I care when I know it’s just a crazy uncle type of word that people now laugh at?
So every Jewish baby boy is born an “Orel”? Would that fly?
Literally, yes, “orel” would be true. Exactly how weird it would be for an actual Yiddish speaker to use the word in that context I’m not sure, though I feel safe in saying “weird”.
On a related note, about what DPRK said above, the word “goy” in the sense of “nation” can, and Biblically sometimes does, refer to the Jewish nation. In that context it obviously wouldn’t be derogatory. But a singular Jew would never be referred to as a “goy”.
The word shiksa is derived from a Hebrew word whose literal meaning is a farm animal that died in the field and is therefore unclean and not fit for consumption.
Shiksa was essentially an inside joke that has (mostly) lost its original meaning.
@Mensch, welcome to the Straight Dope, and thank you for your post! But note that the thread to which you replied is two years old, so you might not get any responses. But your post was informative, so thanks for contributing!
What’s the joke? I did note @Thing.Fish 's explanation that sometimes words in Yiddish carry connotations that do not exist in the word they are originally derived from. But he or she also points out that some ultra-Orthodox Jews may only rarely have a need for a non-pejorative word for “gentile”, so maybe it really is supposed to be calling someone a diseased farm animal.
I mentioned in another thread, there is an Akkadian word šikṣu which seems to refer to an ulcer or abscess and may be related to the ultimate etymology of this term (long before Yiddish, of course).
There are two words for “nation/people/folk” in Hebrew: “goy” and “amm” (rhymes with “mom”). The latter term, amm, can refer both to Jews (“ha’amm ha’Yehudi”) and non-Jews (“ha’am ha’Americai”), and is thus pretty much neutral. “Goy”, on the other hand, is used to refer to all people except for the Jews, and therefore is understood to mean the “other”.
No doubt it picked up that meaning early along the line, but what do you make of Genesis 12:
וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֶל אַבְרָם לֶךְ לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ אֶל הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ. וְאֶעֶשְׂךָ לְגוֹי גָּדוֹל וַאֲבָרֶכְךָ וַאֲגַדְּלָה שְׁמֶךָ וֶהְיֵה בְּרָכָה.
Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing
and 2 Samuel 7:
וּמִי כְעַמְּךָ כְּיִשְׂרָאֵל גּוֹי אֶחָד בָּאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר הָלְכוּ אֱלֹהִים לִפְדּוֹת לוֹ לְעָם וְלָשׂוּם לוֹ שֵׁם וְלַעֲשׂוֹת לָכֶם הַגְּדוּלָּה וְנֹרָאוֹת לְאַרְצֶךָ מִפְּנֵי עַמְּךָ אֲשֶׁר פָּדִיתָ לְּךָ מִמִּצְרַיִם גּוֹיִם וֵאלֹהָיו.
And what one nation in the earth is like thy people, even like Israel, whom God went to redeem for a people to himself, and to make him a name, and to do for you great things and terrible, for thy land, before thy people, which thou redeemedst to thee from Egypt, from the nations and their gods?
Actually that last quote is interesting as it includes both words.
Even-Shoshan (1979) defines “goy” as
[אולי הרחבה מן גֵּו גוף, במשמעות: גוף אתני-מדיני, קיבוץ גדול של אנשים] 1. עם, אומה: 2. נכרי, בן עם אחר, לא-יהודי: 3. כנוי של גנאי בפי האדוקים ליהודי חפשי ביחסו לדת או לבור ועם-הארץ ביהדות.
The bracketed gloss suggesting it derives from “a body of people”