THE PUN ALSO RISES

                                               by 

                                         Howard Richler

To pun or not to pun?

            It has been estimated that two-thirds of the jokes in a typical language collection rely on puns. But  puns have been much maligned by a host of commentators. Freud described puns as “cheap” and Oliver Wendell Holmes assailed them as “verbicide.” At times when I’ve used one on my daughter I get accused of telling a Dad joke. Puns, however, have had their defenders. Three hundred years ago Henry Erskine countered the statement that “a pun is the lowest form of wit” by adding that “it is therefore the foundation of all wit,” and Oscar Levant opined that it is the “lowest form of humor-when you didn't think of it first.”

Punning has been a language fixture through the ages.  In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus introduces himself to the Cyclops, as Outis, which means “no man” in Greek.  He, then attacks the giant, who calls for reinforcement from his fellow monsters, with the plea “No man is killing me!”  Naturally, no one rushes to his aid, proving that the pun, is indeed, mightier than the sword.

In the Bible there are many puns on names. In Hebrew, adamah means ground and edom means red. The name Adam may derive from the red earth whence he came. The name Jacob is derived from the word for heel, because he held onto the heel of his older twin brother Esau at birth.  I award Jesus the prize for best Biblical pun. WE read in Matthew 16:18: “Thou art Peter (Greek Petros), and upon this rock (Greek petra) I will build my Church.” Pope Gregory, one-time guardian of the Rock, punned when he stated that English slaves were Non Angli, sed angeli,  that is, “not Angles, but angels.”

Shakespeare’s Puns

Tis said that in the art of punning, Shakespeare was great shakes and without peer

One study uncovered 3000 puns in the Bard's works, with an average of 78 puns per play. Many of these puns occur at climactic moments.  In Macbeth, after Macbeth has killed the King, Lady Macbeth displays a lucid dispassion when she avers, “I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal. For it must seem their guilt.”   At the beginning of Julius Caesar, the cobbler says he is a “saver of lost soles,” and if they are in danger, he re-covers them.” In Romeo and Juliet, the dying Mercutio exits stage left with this vaudevillian pun, “Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.”  This is but one of the estimated 175 puns in Romeo and Juliet.  Even the great Dane himself,  Hamlet, doggedly can not forgo expiring without  the pun “the rest is silence,”  proving the maxim that “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

Hamlet contains the most puns of all tragedies and there is a specific psychological reason for this. Prince Hamlet is forced to quibble and speak in ambiguous language lest he utter something overtly treasonous. The first encounter of Hamlet and Claudius highlights Hamlet’s clever use of words.  Claudius tries to placate Hamlet by addressing him as  “my Cosin Hamlet, and my sonne.” Hamlet then quips, “A

little more then kin, and lesse than kind.” Here, “kind”  possesses at least three meaning.   could be implying that Claudius is less than a direct blood relation or referring to his ancestral stock. “Kind” also means “natural” and Hamlet could be alluding to Claudius’s unnatural lust. And of course, “kind” in Shakespeare’s era also had the modern sense of “considerate.”

            Puns are one of the main weapons of political satire under dictatorships. They flourish during wars of religion, the Revolution, the Occupation and, nearer our time, in most police states.” A pun under Leonid Brezhnev`s Soviet regime declared that there was no news in Pravda (“truth”  in Russian) and no truth in Izvestia (“news” in Russian).

             

            What constitutes a great pun is largely subjective. Two of my favorites are the following:

A timid husband is unable to buy his wife's preferred anemones for her birthday and fearfully returns home bearing some greenery. To his surprise she gushes “With fronds like these who needs anemones? ” 

           

            A woman had twins, and gave them up for adoption. One of them went to an Egyptian family who named him Amal. The other was  adopted by a Spanish family who called him Juan. Years later, Juan sends a  picture of himself to his birth mother. She tells her husband that she would also like to have a photograph of Amal. Her husband responds, “But they’re twins! If you’ve seen Juan, you've seen Amal.”

 

            Here's a brief sampling of puns both sublime and ridiculous from some well-known pundits.

Groucho Marx –  Time wounds all heels.

When someone exclaimed “ Eureka.”  Chico Marx shot back – “You donna smella so good yourself. ” 

Edgar Bergen –  Show me where Stalin`s buried and I`ll show you a Communist plot.

Max Eastman – One of the advantages of nuclear war is that all men are cremated equal.

Dorothy Parker (asked to give a sentence with the word horticulture) –  You can lead a horticulture but you can`t make her think.

Oscar Wilde – Working is the curse of the drinking class.

H.L. Mencken –  Television is like a steak: a medium rarely well done.

Zsa Zsa Gabor – I am a very good housekeeper. Every time I get divorced, I keep the house.

Oscar Levant – (in an observation of Elizabeth Taylor) Always a bride, never a bridesmaid

 

VARIETY OF PUNS

French/English pun
          Did you hear about the French chef who committed suicide?  He lost the huile d'olive.

            Spelling & comprehension pun

            Little Johnny goes out on Halloween and rings the doorbell at Mrs Wilson’s. When she sees him she crows, “Johnny, what a lovely pirate suit but where are your buccaneers.”  Johnnny replies, “Where else? They’re under my buckin’ hat.”

Grammatical pun

            A woman picks up a cab at Boston Airport and asks “Can you tell me

where I can get scrod.” The cabby replies,  “Hey, I've never heard it expressed before in the pluperfect subjunctive.”

Animal Pun

            A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The flight attendant

looks at him and says, “I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger. ”

Bar Pun

A three-legged dog walks into a saloon in the Old West. He sidles up to  the bar and announces: I'm looking for the man who shot my paw.

Crime Pun

            A thief breaks into the local police station and steals all the toilets and urinals, leaving no clues. A  CSI spokesperson was quoted as saying, “We have absolutely nothing to go on.”

            Ethnic & Geographical Pun

                         If you’re a Canadian when you’re outside the bathroom, what are you when

you’re in the bathroom? European.

             Health Care Puns

A man walks into a psychiatrist's office wearing only underwear made of

Saran Wrap. The psychiatrist says,  “Well, I can clearly see your nuts.”

   Quasi-Sexual Puns

An old man     takes a short-cut through an alley and is accosted by a busty wench  leaning on a lamppost clad in a rather short skirt. She asks him, “Hey buddy. Care for some super sex?”   He replies, “You know, I think I prefer the soup.”

Religious Pun

            Why is there an Old Testament and a New Testament?  Because even God keeps two sets of books.

Spoonerism Pun

First I’ll explain what a spoonerism is. It’s when you transpose phrases so an expression like Light rain becomes right lane. Oscar Wilde  quip that I mentioned earlier– Working is the curse of the drinking class is an example of a spoonerism.

With these examples in mind tell me if you get this spooneristic joke:

What`s the difference between a rooster and a lawyer?” Answer: “The rooster clucks defiance...”

We get the word  “spoonerism” from the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, Warden of New College in Oxford between 1903 and 1924. He was a highly respected administrator responsible for many reforms. History has been unkind to the dear Reverend. He is not remembered for his forward thinking but for his linguistic reversals, which have come to be called “spoonerisms.” An example of his mistakes, he once introduced Dr. Childe`s friend as “Dr. Friend`s child.” Oxonian students exaggerated his mistakes claiming  that during a wedding at which he officiated he supposedly blathered “if anyone present knows why this couple shouldn't be joyfully loined together Over time, the spoonerism has permeated popular culture in a myriad of ways and has become a popular comedic device. The Monty Python comedy troupe  made particular memorable use of spoonerisms. They had a skit in which a customer walks into a bookshop and asks the proprietor if he has a Sale of Two Titties by Darles Chickens?

Yiddish Cursing

I mentioned in my part on puns that political puns allow an outlet for oppressed groups or those who are afraid to directly make a criticism of a totalitarian government,

Verbal wit can serve as a safe outlet for repressed impulses. If your aggression is likely to elicit retaliation, it is prudent that your slings and arrows be linguistic rather than physical. Cursing has proved to be a cathartic tool for oppressed minorities. This is borne out by the colourful curses to be found among chronically subjugated groups such as gypsies, African-Americans and, of course,  Eastern European Jews.

 

The Jews who lived in Eastern Europe before WWII had no problems cursing creatively, as they enjoyed the advantage of speaking Yiddish, a tongue seemingly fashioned exclusively for the prickly barb. Leo Rosten described Yiddish as “a tongue that never takes its tongue out of its cheek” Yiddish curses should not be confused with the Hebraic curses of the Bible. Hebrew curses were deadly serious whereas there is a humorous thrust to almost all Yiddish curses. Although most people associate cursing with malevolence, Yiddish ones can be downright jocular. This is because the Yiddish curser usually does not believe in the power of her or his execrations. Yiddish cursing developed into a choreographed activity where satisfaction was gained by ejaculating an imaginative curse. Many of the curses were improvised and were designed to exhibit the verbal nimbleness of the execrator.  Yiddish curses lull you with their seeming innocence, then flatten you with

the punch line. An example of this verbal feinting is “May you lose all your teeth except one –so you can have a tooth ache.”

This is not to say that ill will was never directed towards others in Yiddish curses. Shtetl life in Eastern Europe was onerous and interactions did not take place in idyllically bucolic settings with fiddlers prancing on rooftops. In this environment, an acerbic wit and a good delivery could earn one much respect  A good example is, “May you fall into the outhouse just as a regiment of Cossacks finishes a prune stew and twelve barrels of beer!”  But in cursing your neighbour or your competitor at the market, you could pretend that the object of your scorn was the Czar or some other oppressor.

 

Yiddish cursing was, by and large, the domain of women. The men enjoyed sanctuary in holy studies but Jewish women could not indulge in this escape. Because men devoted most of their time to religious study, women became the family providers. The only profession open to her was work at the market and to release anxiety in this hectic workplace, it was necessary to learn to “curse like a market-woman.”

One would never merely say “Drop dead!” in Yiddish.  The simplest way of expressing this aspiration was “Into the earth with you! ” or “May he grow like an onion –  with his head in the ground. ” Since a child could only be named after a

deceased, you could kill with kindness by saying “May they name a baby after you!” 

One's death wish could be couched in blessings, as in  “May you have a sweet death and have a wagonload of sugar run over you”; “May God bless you with a son so smart he learns the mourner's prayer before his Bar Mitzvah speech!” and “May you be spared the indignities of old age!” Wishing disease or pain on someone was a popular theme, especially if the individual was wealthy. Benedictions took sudden u-turns and mutated into maledictions: “May he own ten shiploads of gold-and may all of it be spent on sickness.” Many of these disease ill wishes featured cholera, such as  “May the cholera seize him,” “A healthy cholera into your belly” and “A cholera in your bones!”  It must have been felt that bone cholera was more uncomfortable than the run-of-the-mill variety. Other ill wishes included, “May he be thrown into an ague,” “All problems I have in my heart should go to his head,”  “May you become famous – they should name a disease after you!” and “May your blood grow so healthy, your leeches' leeches need leeches!”  Anorexia nervosa was not a common ailment, and a zaftig figure was a sign of affluence and a selling point for the local matchmaker. “May you never develop stomach trouble from too rich a diet” was definitely not a blessing but it sounds desirable next to  “May you grow four stomachs like a cow, so that you get four times the bellyache and four times the heartburn.”

 

Henny Youngman’s mother-in-law jokes notwithstanding, in Yiddish culture, a mother-in-law was not the bane of a man, but of a woman who could be constantly besieged by her mother-in-law in the home or the market. Two examples of women’s disdain for mothers- in-law are, “May your mother-in-law treat you like her own daughter and move in with you!” and “May your husband`s father marry three times so that you have not one but three mothers-in-law!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SENSE & SHIFTABILITY: HOW WORDS CHANGE MEANINGS

                                            By

                                   Howard Richler

Words change meanings because language is alive, it adapts to how people think, live and interact. People don’t use words the way  dictionaries define them. We see the change in the word awful which once meant inspiring awe. Every shift in culture, technology,humour or social norms leaves its mark on words.

 

Gay

As I’ve written language books  and language columns  and give speeches with language themes to many groups, I  am asked many questions but if I had to single out the question I am asked most often it would be, “How did the major sense of  the word ‘gay’ change from 'happy'?”  Here’s the explanation. The first recorded sense, early in the 14^th century, was “noble, “beautiful,” or “excellent”  and often the term was employed poetically to praise exceptional  women. The word re-surfaces in the late 14^th century to refer to something bright or colourful and before long this sense was extended to people and  were considered carefree, lighthearted or cheerful.

But those who are cheerful might be engaging in some form of pleasure and by the 15^th century it could also refer to one  virtually addicted to social pleasures and   a “gay dog”  was term reserved for  a man given to revelling or self-indulgence. In 1630, William Davenant  in The Cruel Brother and  Nicholas Rowe later  in 1703 in Fair Penitent unveiled  libertine characters they dubbed “Lothario.”  As a result, in the 18^th century the term “gay Lothario” was used to refer to such a character. The same sense of a lack of moral rectitude is seen in the expression “gay abandon” that refers to actions taken that are not considered with the consequences that might ensue. In the 19^th century, the word was sometimes applied to  a woman deemed to  lead  an immoral life, such as a prostitute. Also, the term “gaycat” may have influenced the semantic change of the word “gay.”  By the turn of the 20^th century, this word  gaycat was used by hobos  to refer to a tramp’s   companion, usually a young boy, and often his lover.

  The word is first used  with the homosexual connotation in the 1920s by American expatriates living in Paris. The first OED citation with this sense comes from Gertrude Stein's Miss Furr & Miss Skeens found in Geography & Plays (1922): “ Helen Furr and Georgina Keene lived together then‥. They were together then and traveled to another place and stayed there and were gay there,”   There is evidence that the word was used before this date. Hugh Rawson reports in Wicked Words that in 1889 during “the Cleveland Street Scandal (involving post office boys in a male brothel in London's West End), a prostitute named John Saul used gay with reference to both male homosexuals and to female prostitutes when giving evidence to the police and in court.”  Gay's first dictionary appearance in its homosexual sense is in Noel Erskine's  Underworld & Prison Slang (1935) : “Geycat..a homosexual boy.”

Although the word still possesses the sense of “merry,”  the homosexual connotation is the dominant one notwithstanding  the acceptability of  “donning gay apparel” during Yuletide festivities.

Incidentally, “gay” is still evolving and is used by many teenagers to designate what they regard as socially inappropriate, what is often labelled as “lame.”  In 2001, the Washington Post  reported, “Today, they [teenagers] often use gay as an adjective meaning ‘stupid’.‥ A gay movie is a stupid movie or one that makes no sense or one

with a lame plot or all of those things.”

 

 

Nice

I remember this sophomoric joke I first heard during my sophomore year in high school : What’s the difference between a good girl and a nice girl? Answer:  The good girl goes to a party, goes home then goes to bed whereas the nice girl goes to the party, goes to bed then goes home. This depiction of the nice lass would have resonated with Shakespeare;  in Antony & Cleopatra he uses it in this manner when Antony tells his beloved,  “When mine houres were nice and lucky, men did ransome lives.”

The word nice  derives from the Latin nescius, “ignorant” and the first sense of the word at the beginning of the twelfth century was ignorant or foolish. By the end of the 12th  century this foolish behaviour could be deemed to be morally inappropriate and it was at this juncture that it  acquired the sense of lasciviousness. Starting in the 14^th century the word obtained many other senses including “extravagant,” “scrupulous,” “coy,”

“dainty,”  and “refined.”  It wasn’t  until the middle of the 18^th century that we saw a full semantic inversion, when the word started to be used as a synonym for “pleasant.”

 So in  a processs similar to broken telephone nice went thru this transformation: loose-mannered-foolish-wanton-lazy-effeminate-tender-delicate-shy-refined-fine-agreeable-kind- pleasant.

Nice is an example of how words s/t take on an improved sense. This process is called amelioration. The opposite process is call pejoration and we’ll first look at some words whose senses went down.

GOINGDOWN

Sad

  Originally if you were sad you were probably stuffed with Cornish hen because its meaning in the first millennium was “sated.”  Sad developed its sense of sorrowful  or regretful in the 14^th century but it also could mean steadfast, valiant, serious, calm or learned and was  used as such by Geoffrey Chaucer.  W In the 17^th century it acquired still more senses such as deplorable and then unfortunate.  Since the 20^th century sad can also imply one who is socially undesirable.

 

Silly 

We see a progression towards a sense of “foolish” with this word. When it first surfaced in the 13^th century its original sense was “deserving of pity” and over the next three centuries it acquired the senses of weak, meagre, trifling, and unlearned. At one point the word became the conventional poetic adjective of choice to describe sheep. What is weak is often regarded as inconsequential and the inconsequential are often regarded as foolish. Hence it wasn't a major leap when its now dominant sense of foolish was attained toward the end of the 16^th century. Interestingly, the original sense of silly came

from the defunct  adjective “seely” whose sense was wholly positive and could mean happy, lucky or blessed. Similarly, the word  “cretin” derives from “Christian.” The term creitin or crestin was used in the Swiss Alps to refer to someone afflicted with mental weakness and stunted growth who it was believed  would retain a child-like innocence that would protect him or her from committing grave sins. It would not take long for the “fools of God” to be regarded merely as fools.

 

Villain

The serfs in feudal England did not receive good press. The  OED definition of “villain”  is “a low-born base-minded rustic; a man of ignoble ideas or instincts.”  Later it came to mean, “an unprincipled or depraved scoundrel; a man naturally disposed to base or criminal actions, or deeply involved in the commission of disgraceful crimes.” The word ultimately derives from the Latin villa, “village,” and is used in the early 14^th century to refer to a person of simple means but within fifty years came to denote someone who was wicked. Similarly both the words clown and peasant only meant you lived in the country and didn’t carry a pejorative sense. Lewd orig just referred to t laity and vulgar just meant common. Interestingly noble originally just referred to the upper level of your birth and didn’t imply high moral character,  harlot originally meant villain or knave didn’t refer specifically to women. In fact t words harlot, witch and shrew originally applied to men not women. We see this diminishing words relating to women in other words such as mistress, governess and majorette.

GOINGUP

Fond

Fond has definitely improved over time. In the 14^th century it meant “insipid” or foolish.” This is the sense of the word when Prince Hamlet says “From the table of my memory, I'll wipe all fond records.” Similarly, when King Lear describes himself as fond, he is saying that he is doting and  affectionate in a foolish manner. In the late 16^th century the meaning shifted and “fond” was used  in a positive sense to mean loving and tender or having a strong affection for someone or something.

Shrewd

Shrewd has definitely improved over time. In the 14^th century it was synonymous

with depraved, wicked and malignant.  It passed into a weaker sense where  it could mean  malicious, harsh, ugly, naughty in the case of children  and vicious in the case of animals. In the 16^th century it came to mean artful or cunning but cunning was not usually seen in a  complimentary light, and was  usually interpreted as “dangerous.”  This is the sense Shakespeare uses the word in Richard 11  when the King talks about men who “lift shrewd steel against our golden crown.” Notwithstanding all the negative connotations of shrewd by the 17^th century  a favourable sense of the word to mean “artful” had developed.   

Perhaps the greatest change of meaning of words are in adjectives because they’re more like to be interpreted differently. We do see some examples where this has happened with verbs. Here are a few examples.

 

Fizzle

In the 16^th century the original sense of fizzle  was “to break wind silently.” (As adolescents my puerile friends and I restricted only good farts to the category  SBD, “silent but deadly.”) In Philemon Holland's  17^th century translation of Pliny's Natural History, we read “ As for Onopordon they say that if asses eat thereof, they will fall a fizling and farting.” (Onopordon literally means “ass fart.”)  In Benjamin Walsh’s  translation of Aristophanes’ Knights (1837): “And then in court they poisoned one another with their fizzles.” In the 19^th century the word could refer to a weak sputtering  hissing sound  and was used figuratively to mean  “end weakly.” The modern sense of fizzle first appeared in the USA in the 19^th century with a sense of “fiasco.” In any case,  you may never again complain that your partner has lost his/her fizzle.

Convince

In the 16^th century if you convinced someone about some trifle, you may have been making them a godfatherly offer they couldn't refuse because the first sense of “convince” was conquer or overcome. Subsequently, the art of convincing became somewhat more subtle.

Jilt

Jilt originally may have referred to what Jill really did on the hill rather than fetch a pail of water with Jack, as its first meaning  in the 17^th century was “a woman who has lost her chastity.” Later in the 17^th century  the word referred to a lady who capriciously casts off a lover after giving him encouragement  and when Samuel Johnson wrote his Dictionary of the English Language in1755 he defined the word as  “a woman who gives her lover hopes, and deceives him.” By the 17^th century the word was being rendered as a verb meaning to deceive or discard a lover  and by the 18^th century in the name of gender equality men as well as women could jilt.

Interestingly, in the play Hamlet when Hamlet’s mother Gertrude says “the lady doth protest too much, methinks,” protest here has the sense that the lady in question is talking too much and not the modern sense of overly objecting.

 

 

 

NOUNS

Adjectives are very prone to changes of meaning due to their descriptive nature and as we’ve seen some even take on opposite meanings to their original senses. One might think that as nouns represent objects, their meanings would be constant. But even here, we say how time changes many meanings of nouns, Here are some examples.

Curfew

If you establish a curfew for a teenager, you may be doing so to protect the young hellion from metaphorical burns. A curfew, however, was established originally not to avoid metaphorical fires but actual ones. In medieval Europe, many communities enacted a regulation whereby a bell was rung at a fixed hour in the evening signalling that street fires be extinguished, sometimes by covering the fire. This applied also to lights and was termed couvre feu, French for “cover fire.” This morphed almost immediately in English to “curfew,” and by the 13^th century “curfew” merely designated the time the evening bell was rung.  Only in the 20^th  century was the sense of curfew extended to refer to other restricted outdoor nocturnal activities. Punch magazine in 1939 stated,  “The attempt..to get a nine o'clock curfew imposed on members of the Women's Land Army in training..to prevent them going out with soldiers.” How ironic that a French word should dampen passion!

Shibboleth

A shibboleth refers to a catchword that marks one as a member of a group and the original meaning of the word was somewhat similar, but its source is surprising. The OED relates that its first sense was as  “the Hebrew word used by Jephthah as a test-word by which to distinguish the fleeing Ephraimites (who could not pronounce the sh) from his own men the Gileadites (Judges 12: 4–6).” So it is fair to say that  originally exclusion from the select group could prove deadly.  “Shibboleth” in Hebrew seemingly had the innocuous meaning of an “ear of corn.”  The OED points out that increasingly in the 20^th century, the word is used to refer to “a moral formula held tenaciously and unreflectingly, especially a prohibitive one; a taboo.”

Humour

There is absolutely nothing funny about the first definition of this word. The  OED informs us that “in ancient and mediæval physiology a person's physical and mental qualities and  disposition  were determined by the proportions of your humours the four chief fluids which were  blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy or black choler. So if you had too much blood you were probably sanguine and optimistic; too much phlegm made you too much yellow bile would make you choleric; and an excess of black bile  led to melancholy.It is  in the late 17^th century when the sense of “funniness” emerges probably with  the idea that if you had good humours you had a quirky personality and people found this quirkiness to be amusing.

Talent

The OED shows this initial sense of “talent”: “An ancient weight, a money of account ; a  denomination of weight, used by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and other ancient nations”  This original sense in  Wycliffe's 1382 translation of the Bible in this passage from Exodus: “An hundryd talentes of silver.” But talent went through  these changes of meaning: value of money-wealth-disposition-natural ability, with this last sense  occurring as  early as 1430. Notwithstanding that this sense had been around for almost four centuries and must have been entrenched by  the 19^th century, poet Samuel Coleridge refused to  accept it. He wrote “I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable talented, stealing out of the newspapers.Why not shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced, etc.” This demonstrates that s/t people e have a hard time accepting new meanings of words. I once reviewed a book where the author objected to the use of the word livid meaning enraged notwithstanding that is t way t word has been defined since the 19^th century. Why? Because the original sense if the word was “of a blue leaden colour.”

Luxury

We see  the societal shift in values  in the changing meaning of the word “luxury.”   It  was originally seen as denoting sinful self-indulgence. Hence one of the first citations of the word  comes from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1386): “O foule luste of luxurie.” The lascivious taint of luxury is seen in Hamlet when the Prince’s ghost-father tells his son that the “royal bed of Denmark” is being used as “A couch for luxury and damned incest.”

In the  17^th  century it acquired the sense of habitual use of what is choice or costly and it wasn't until the 19^th  century that it obtained its modern sense of contributing to sumptuous living. I would not be surprised, however, if in the future the word “luxury” loses its sheen. The word has been used to death in advertising, and like me I assume you've stayed at aa “luxury hotel” that was rather mediocre.

Jeopardy

Jeopardy originally referred to a problem in chess  and derives from the French jeu parti  that means “even game.”  When a game is even both players are in danger of losing and for this reason “jeopardy” came to mean

“uncertainty” and eventually to refer to “serious danger.”  Because of the danger element it also came to refer to a daring exploit. Its first English usage “ieupardyes” comes from  Chaucer  in Dethe Blaunche

 in 1369. The spelling  “jeopardy” only became standard in the latter half  of the 17^th century.

Ordeal

This word in Old English had a specific legal meaning. It referred  to a trial in which an accused person was subjected to a test, usually involving physical pain or danger. If you

overcame these crucibles it was regarded as divine proof of your innocence. These tests were ordeals by fire, (e.g., carrying heated metal) hot water, (plunging your hands into boiling water) cold water, and combat. It wouldn't be  until 1215 that these legal methods were abolished.  As in modern-day reality television, these ordeals were somewhat rigged. To be declared innocent one would have to accomplish the impossible, such as carrying red-hot coals without being burned. It was only in the 17^th century that ordeal acquired its metaphorical and less painful meaning of a “trying experience.”

 

 

 

AGRICULTURE

City slicker might be shocked to learn that there was a time when people's interactions with animals transcended their appearance on plates as cheeseburgers  and chicken fingers.  For most of our civilized history people lived in agricultural societies where one was likely to rub snouts with a sheep or a pig and animals played significant roles in ones ability to survive and flourish. People shared the same farm and often the same house with animals. And of such many words referred to agriculture before their meaning altered.

Pedigree

If you take pride in your  pedigree, (or more likely your dog's ) you might be chastened to know that according to the original sense of the word, you are effectively crowing about the “foot of a crane.” The first sense of pedigree in the 15^th century was a “genealogical table.” Documents that recorded a family tree used a three-line graph that apparently resembled the imprint of  the bony foot of the crane (pied de grue in French.) From the original meaning, the movement of the word to refer to ones' lineage was an obvious adaptation and this change occurred within twenty-five years of the adoption of the word from French.

 

Aftermath

Aftermath sounds as if it deals with your lamentations after a trigonometry exam, but I assure you it has no connection to mathematics. Also, if you associate the word with “nuclear,” take heart that the original sense was far less catastrophic. The “math” segment is merely a variation of the word “mow” and “aftermath” originally referred to the second mowing of grass. The OED says that is the “crop of grass which springs up after the mowing in early summer,” and in an 1860 issue of Farmer's Almanac there is a reference to a “good aftermath.” Aftermath entered our language  in the 15^th century and within one hundred and fifty years its dominant sense became an invariably unpleasant condition that results from some important event.

 

 

 

RELIGION

I believe it is a fair assumption that in days gone by, when most folks were God-fearing  and hell- aversive, religion played a larger role in the lives of individuals. As such, it is not surprising that many words derive from religion. While some words such as advent, shrift and crusade have an obvious religious origin, many others’ religious connection is more shrouded. Here are two examples.

Charisma

If you believe charisma is a God-given attribute,  you are in agreement with its first definition found in the 17^th century: “A free gift or favour specially vouchsafed by God; a grace, a talent.”  It was first used in a secular sense to mean an aura one possesses and the  power of leadership or authority  in by sociologist Max Weber in 1922, Weber's work wasn't translated into English until 1947 but the term was already used in English by the mid 1930s.  Not surprisingly, by the middle forties, the term was applied to political leaders in Germany  and in the early sixties to JFK.

Gossip

The first definition of gossip in the OED in the eleventh century implies that (heaven forbid) going to church can be dangerous to your health: “One who has contracted spiritual affinity with another by acting as a sponsor at a baptism.”  The etymology of this word is more understandable once we realize that the first syllable comes from “God” and the second from “sib” as in “sibling.” In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1386), the Wife of Bath tells her fellow travellers to Canterbury about having once promenaded with her lover and  “my gossib dame Alys.”   Queen Elizabeth was the “gossip” at the baptism of James VI of Scotland.  But it could also refer to the women friends of the gossip invited to the baptism. In Midsummer Night`s Dream, Puck uses it in this sense: It must have been felt that there was too much chattering at christenings because by the 17^th century the dominant sense of the word became  “newsmonger.”      

 

MILITARY

I don’t suppose  that many people would be surprised that several wors like campaign, echelon and picket derive from military usages. But several other ones are more camouflaged. Here are a couple of examples.

Loophole

Loopholes go back to the 13^th century and it was soldiers, not tax lawyers, that originally used them to their advantage. Then, a loop referred to a narrow window and thus originally, a loophole referred to the narrow vertical opening in medieval fortifications through which soldiers could fire their projectiles at their enemies. The invention of gunpowder diminished the military efficacy of these openings and the word came to refer to any small opening in a wall that allowed in air and light.  By 1663, it is used in a metaphorical sense to refer to an outlet or means of escape.  In 1704, satirist Thomas Brown first used it in the sense it is often used today of taking advantage of legal ambiguity: “Some of the Doctor's Counsel has found out a Loop-hole for him in the Act.”

Deadline

Journalists who have problems dealing with deadlines can take some comfort knowing  that the word used to refer to a far graver situation. The first definition of deadline in the OED is of “a line drawn around a military prison, beyond which a prisoner is liable to be shot down.”  During the American Civil War, at the Confederate camp located in  Andersonville, Georgia, a line was actually marked out some distance from the outer wire fence. Any Union prisoner crossing this line was shot on sight.  This doesn’t sound very civil to me. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yinglish-Schminglish   

 

In 1997 I started to see a nefarious plot to Yinglishize  my mother tongue  by members outside  my chosen tribe. That year when I was writing my weekly language column in The Gazette I phoned books editor, Bryan Demchinsky of Ukranian descent  to see if he had received a book I wanted to review. The book in question was entitled The Bible Code and it purported some mishugas that hidden inside the Torah were coded messages that predicted events such as the bombing in Oklahoma City in1995 and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin later that same year. Demchinsky told me he had perused the book  and that in his opinion “it looked like a bunch of dreck.” This surprised me, but not because I held a contrary view of the book. No, what stunned me was my goyishe editor’s knowledge of the word  dreck.

 

This process then proliferated  like a virus among Gazette staffers. In 1999, columnist  nishtayid Don MacPherson wrote  “Perhaps Bouchard was just trying to avoid unnecessary tsuris at the next meeting of the PQ national council.”Before the end of the century Gazette movie critic Brendan Kelly said  that even though actor Robert Carlyle  has a penchant for playing  monsters like Hitler  that at least Carlyle was a monster mensch.

 

So it was at this juncture that I realized that Yinglish was ubiquitous. In August of the new millennium  I caught the following in the Globe & Mail by Elzabeth Renzetti : “I know that she was once fat, on the precipice of obese, and  dreading sailing off into the floaty stage, the point in which the  zaftig give up all fashion sense and begin dressing like Mama Cass.”   And at about the same time Maureen Dowd wrote  in the New York Times that Vice President  Cheney and his aides “shoehorned all their meshugas about Saddam’s aluminum tubes, weapons labs and al Qaeda links into Powell’s UN speech.”  But wait, there’s more! In 2005 Time magazine featured this line  by  someone named  J.F.O. Mcallister on the upcoming marriage of Charles and  Camilla. “Last week there were a few signs of apathy in the sea of schmaltz about enduring love.” Also in 2005 Liam Lacey reviewed a  movie called Prime in the Globe & Mail. The headline was  “What a shemozzle” and the review said that Meryl Streep was presented as a stereotypical Jewish mother: “ She kvetches, plotzes. Gets verklempt and all those other Yiddish things”… .” The word shemozzle   is an example of how words morph.It’s more likelyto be used by Gentiles than by Jews.   It is thought to be be derived from the word mazel and is usually used to mean confusion or chaos. It was popularized by the Anglo Irish writer and comedian Spike Milligan in his comedic writings and WWII  memoirs.At this point Yinglish usage by goyim was so common that I stopped collecting them. It appeared that Jews no longer solely owned Yinglish. I could have sued these plunderers for cultural appropriation.

 

 But sometimes Yiddish is not only misused or fractured it is butchered in a very treyf manner.  Many years ago,  before the Canadian Alliance Party had been created then  Reform backbencher Lee Morrisson from Saskatchewan wanted to refer to  Human Resource Minister’s Jane Stewart’s  gall  but  he felt that the word gall  wasn’t  quite potent  enough. So he said “You got to admire the jutsper JUTSPER of the Minister of Human Resources.” Parliament sensed a linguistic travesty had been committed on the Yiddish language and convulsed into laughter. Then Herb Gray  a member of the Tribe of Israel) said he had two words to describe Morrison’s question; “Gornisht and absolute narishkayt.” This again convulsed the distinguished members notwithstanding hardly anybody knew what Grey had said. This caused Speaker Gib Parent to say, “Order please, I have no way of knowing whether these words are unparliamentary

Montreal Jewry has retained many Yiddish aspects to our speech patterns and sometimes it even affects our grammar.  My daughter Jennifer was apprised of her sub-standard English during her first year at Yale University. Jennifer was enjoying a nosh with her dormmates, some of whom were Jewish and she exclaimed   “This cake is so good, you want? ”  This plea was greeted with consternation  by her roomies. Notwithstanding that Jennifer was  majoring at the time in linguistics, she was informed by her fellow student that this  sentence didn’t correspond to the elementary grammar drummed into them their whole lives. After all, there was no direct object, Her friends probably thought she should have said “You want some?”or You want some cake?”

 

This conversational style, though, in quite common among Montreal anglophones who are Jewish. If asked by someone whether a particular object was available in Montreal, A Jewish person might answer; “You could find. ”  If asked whether the dessert is included in the price of a meal, the answer might be, “It comes with.”  This lack of a direct object follows the grammatical structure of  manyYiddish  expressions ( es kumt mit). In addition, it is common to respond to a question with another question which is oft peppered by an implied or stated complaint.   Hence the seemingly innocuous question “How are you? ” could  elicit, “How should I be with my knees? ”

 

It is difficult to escape one’s roots.  When I was in business I had a  non-Jewish business associate from Massachusetts with whom I became quite friendly and we would often shoot the breeze over the phone.  Often, in response to some wry comment  he made, I answered him by saying  “go know.”  After years of using this expression finally one day he said to me in an exasperated fashion. “Howie, you keep saying ‘go know’ to me. What the ef  do you mean? ”  I was surprised that he didn’t know what I meant and when I got home  I checked in my Joys of Yiddish  by Leo Rosten the expression Go Know which stated, “Yinglish. From the Yiddish expression Gey vays (meaning, “go know.”) ”   It said the expression could mean “How could I know?”, “How could you expect me to know?”  or “How could anyone know?”.    Probably if I had said “Go figure,”  my friend would have known what I meant. Who knows?

 

It’s important to remember that a word in one language doesn’t have to mean the same in another language. Mensch in German just means man or human being; in Yiddish it epitomizes good behaviour. In Yiddish,“ chutzpah” only has a negative meaning, that of “brazen effrontery or impudence.”  In English, however, “chutzpah” is a more prolific word, usually defined as “outrageous nerve” but this definition is invariably coupled with an explanation.  Two of the favorite chutzpah examples are:

- Someone who kills both parents and pleads for mercy before the judge because he is an    orphan and reporting your landlord for building-code violations when you’re six months behind in the rent.

 

When the word “chutzpah”, is used in a political sense, the meaning is usually not complimentary and is used to describe “extreme gall.”  James Reston of the New York Times assessing the sexual antics of presidential candidate Senator Gary Hart in 1987 said, “Mr. Hart’s  chutzpa has hit a new level of political arrogance.” We must remember, however, that he was referencing a pre-Clintonesque not to mention the pre-Trump era.

Interestingly in the Talmud over 1500 years ago the term chutzpah gets grudging approval. In one tractate it says that “’impudence (or chutzpah) against Heaven is of avail.’

 

While the Inuits may have many words for snow we have many words for a more important  and prevalent category: losers. Observe   “schmo”, “schmuck”, “nudnik” and meshugenne  schmendrick schmeggegge  schlimazel , schnorrer and  nebbish to name but a  few. There are nuances of meanings to describe these  unfortunate characters. It is said that a shlemiel trips, and knocks down the shlemazl and the nebbish repairs the schlimazl’s glasses.

 

Altho we associate Yinglish terms largely  with North American vernacular, their usage is more widespread thansolely our continent. We see the word nosh being used in England in the 1870s but with the idea of it being a meal not a snack which came into NA usage in the 1940s. In fact a former girlfriend whose mother  lives in Yorkshire and is  over 90 used it in this manner   The term “shicker”  is also listed in the OED as an Australian and New Zealand colloquialism.   Until the last 30 years the term shicker was the most commonly used term for a drunk Down Under. I suppose these terms came into British English vernacular in the 19th century when it was common for Jewish merchants to rub shoulders with people in East London. You will  also find some distinct spelling of Jewish words in British Eng. For example gefilte as in gefilte fish is rendered in the OED as gefulte  GEFULTE with an umlaut over the U.

 

Some of the most basic English words have a particular Yiddish sense.  The OED mentions that as of 1903, the word “already” had been “Yiddishized” when  placed “in final position to denote emphasis, exasperation, etc.” A good example of this is the expression “enough already.” Its more concise than saying I’ve had it and I wont take it anymore.“Need”  also is used in a Yiddish sense to imply something is unnecessary, as in the expression “Who needs it?”   Non-Montreal anglophones laugh when I tell them  “I’m going to make an order.”  meaning  grocery shopping. Interestingly this  usage of “make” is found in French as well as English and  I discovered that it is also prevalent in New Orleans  where Eng is also influenced by French.

 

Over 30 years ago I  lobbied for the inclusion of the word  “nakhes” usually  spelled NACHES into the OED  bc the word had a distinct meaning that wasn’t expressed by any word in English  Perhaps, my lobbying effort ,  wasn’t in vain b/c it  was added to the OED  in 1992  with the spelling  following definition: “Among Jews, a sense of pleasure or pride at the achievements of one’s children.”  I suspect, however, that people from all ethnic groups also share this emotion.

 

The television program, Saturday Night Live, however, in the 1990s made popular the usage of two unlikely Yiddish candidates. In a segment entitled Coffee Talk, Canadian Mike Myers played the character  Linda Richman who was prone to using the words shpilkes, “nervous energy” and farklempt,”all choked up.”

 

There are some disputed terms that etymologists aren’t sure if the English word comes from Yiddish. The word kibosh, “to forbid with unmistakeable consequences , is first cited by Dickens in 1836. It could be from Yiddish via German keibe-carrion; or French cabocher=to cut off; or Irish cie bas-cap of death. The OED  entry for glitch says etymology unknown but it prob comes from the Yid glitsh-slip from the Old German glitan-to glide. Another disputed term is the slang word copasetic-all right. Some say it comes from the Heb Kol ba seder-all in order but the word derived out of Black English. Still it is possible that some Jewish storekeeper in the South said kol ba seder and this was picked up by Black customers-We’ll never really know for sure.

So why are there so many Yiddish terms in Eng? I suspect that unlike naches many Yiddish words get absorbed into English, not because they introduce a new concept in English but because they’re fun to say.  After all, the  derogatory words for people such as , “schlemiel”, “schmo”, “schmuck”, “nudnik” and “meshugenne” roll off the tongue with glee.

 

While it is easy to spot many Yiddishisms from their initial sound  -sh,  in some cases, the Yiddish connection isn’t so obvious and s/t Yiddish isn’t the source Take mishmash – it sounds Yiddish but the OED traces the word mishmash back to the Danish misk-mask and shows the word entering the English language in 1452.  It was, however, early 20th century New York Jews who popularized this vivid word possibly because they found the double -sh sound particularly appealing.  Another word commonly thought to come from Yiddish is “finagle,” maybe because it rhymes with bagel. It actually comes from an archaic English word “fainaigue” which means to cheat.

 

Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto published in 1892 is the champion tome in the OED for  Yiddish words that have filtered into our language. Here is a partial list of some of the words whose first citation  derives from this work : “chutzpah ”  “koppel” (skullcap), “kreplach”  “Litvak”  “lokshen” “meshummad” (apostate), the interjections “nu” and “oy,”  “potch” “rebbitzin” , “schnorrer” , “sheitel” “shicker” , “shidduch”, “shiksa” , “schlemiel” , “tzimmes” and  “Yiddishkeit”

 

Some  literary lights are highlighted by having the first  OED citation for words thought to come from Yiddish. As mentioned earlier Dickens receives the first citation for “kibosh” from his work Sketches by Boz :  And as mentioned before we’re not sure of the word’s origin.

 

There is, however, no doubt to the Yiddish pedigree of the duo of “schlep” and “dreck” which are first cited in James Joyce’s Ulysses  in 1922: “She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags her load” and  “Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck. ”

Not surprisingly many Jewish authors are honoured by receiving the first citation of a word borrowed from Yiddish.  Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s  Complaint gives us two naughty words, “shtup”  and “schlong.” Not to be undone,  Saul Bellow’s Herzog provides us with three first citations:   “Heimisch” “kvetch  and “schmegeggy”  My late cousin Mordecai  Richler’s novel Cocksure is the first cited work for the word “schmaltz” “and receives the second recorded citation  for “schmutz”

 

A fairly recent word puzzle in the NYT shows how prevalent     Jewish related terms are in English. I wouldn’t be  surprisethewd if some of you occasionally do the word game Spelling Bee found daily in the NYT. Here are some of the Jewish related words that appear regularly. Hora , tallit, cabala, torah ( it can be noncapitalized when it means instruction) latke, gelt, golem and yenta  and it allows 2 spellings (y-e-n-t-e and y-e-n-t-a) chutzpah  putz, and chuppah with the last 3 appearing in the March 18^th puzzle. I’ve never seen the word kvetch appear because of the letter combinations but I’m sure it would be an allowed word. You will notice here that I haven’t included any of the many words that contain an S because spelling bee almost never allows word with an S because of how easy it allows pluralized words. There is definitely a preference for Jewish related words in this puzzle because many other words aren’t accepted that are found in most dictionaries such as telly for tv, nappy,  the British term for a diaper, kitting a British term for supplying and the Arabic terms wadi that refers to a dry riverbed, ravine or valley found in deserts and muezzin, the person who calls Muslim to prayer. By secr

 

The English language is in a constant state of flux and many words over time acquire new meanings. Recently, my daughter sent me a NYT article that showed that the term “goyslop” had become popularized among adolescents to refer to low quality food.  Before reading the article she had heard my grandson Judah use the expression. The NYT article gives an example of its usage: “If your friend goes to McDonalds and gets two burgers and a shake, that’s so goyslop.” I did some research on the term’s use by teenagers and found that it can also refer to unoriginal or overly commercial TV shows or movies. What is also remarkable is the fact that this term was adapted by right-wing anti-Semites who see the world as being controlled by secretive Jewish cabals and that the very existence of “goy” is proof of their supremacist plot  to poison the minds of Gentiles. In fact, there exists a neo-Nazi group called the Goyim Defense League and a fringe crowfunding platform called GoyFundMe. Very few teenagers who use the term “goyslop” are aware of the term’s anti-Semitic origin.

 

Since 2000 starting with the letter M, the OED started a new edition and added many new words and it is astonishing how many of them are words familiar to English speakers with a passing knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew. Here are the new M Jewish words: “maariv” “macher” , “ “Megillah” “melamed”   “meshuggener” “mezuza “mieskeit” “mincha” “mishpocha” “Mizrachi”  and  “mohel.”  The OED  also  updating  definitions of  certain  words already catalogued as is the  case with the word “mamzer.”  The old definition merely defines  it as “a bastard,” whereas the revised entry elucidates that it is “a person conceived in a forbidden sexual union, especially as defined by rabbinical tradition.”
 

In any case, don’t you find it fitting that a language like Yiddish that wantonly  “sleeps around” the way that English does, should have “mamzer” in its midst?

 

Thank You for listening.