‘Foreignisms’ and the tapestry of language borrowings

I had reason to pull out a neat old book of mine this week. It’s one that my mom gave me back in the late '80s, written by a gentleman named Tad Tuleja, who is often referred to as a “folklorist” in web references. The Folklorist moniker may be a bit generous. Teluja

was the master of turning out a variety of books designed to sell at shopping mall booksellers, and he spawned quite a few. His books range from selling techniques to investment advice, but many are decidedly lighthearted and include snappy titles like “Curious Customs,” “Fabulous Fallacies,” and “The Cat’s Pajamas.” The gentleman obviously loves to play with words and does so with tongue firmly planted in cheek throughout his book, “Foreignisms.”

As a result of recent events in the Middle East, I have had an uptick in social media communications with a few of my buddies from the East Coast, nearly all pro-Israel and many of Jewish heritage themselves. In the course of those discussions, a few Yiddish terms have been thrown around, and I do my best to respond in kind, whether qualified by heritage or not.

As one who was exposed to the east-coast garment industry as a kid, there was a time when a splash of Yiddish in my daily vocabulary was more than occasional, but after 25 years of life in the rural midwest, I’ve grown rusty. Consequently, my whimsical book about foreign words and phrases became my refresher course.

Yiddish has as many cleverly insulting monikers for people as Inuits have for snow. A shocking number of them are references to male genitalia, which, as I recall, often came in handy when dealing with dishonest, aggressive, or witless business counterparts. The words putz (puhts), schmuck (shmuhk), and shmo (shmoh) all mean approximately the same thing but with nuanced levels of intensity.

Another frequently used epithet not included in Tejula’s book is “schnorrer.” My recollection was a pronunciation that rhymed with “sure” or “cure,” but whatever the pronunciation, the word was intended to mean a cheapskate or miserly person. Teluja does, however, include gonif (GAH-nihf), a thief or cunning person; meshugge (me-Shuh-guh), which means crazy or strange, and nudnick (NOOHD-nihk), an aggressively boorish person. We all know a few of those.

Even in middle America, a couple of terms made famous by way of an old sitcom are familiar. The word “shlemiel” (shleh-MEEL) describes a fool, while shlimazel (shleh-MAH-zl) is simply an unlucky, hapless person. It was once explained to me that a shlemiel spills his soup, and the shlimazl is the person on whom it is spilled (it will most likely be a goy who cleans up after the accident).

Not all Yiddish terms are derogatory (just the fun ones). More positive idioms that still sneak into my daily use are words like maven (MAY-vehn), an expert, or the German mensch (mehnch), which literally translates as “human being” but is used in Yiddish to describe a genuinely kind person. I know a few of those, too. Once my need to confirm Yiddish spellings was out of the way, I flipped through the book just long enough to be re-awakened to the richness of our language and the many, many foreign-influenced words that we use in our daily conversations.

I was reminded of the common words we borrow from French, like gourmet, money, denim, fiancé, ballet, gourmet, cliché, and a favorite of hipsters, déjà vu. From Italian, we have broccoli, arsenal, propaganda, casino, quarantine, and nearly every musical directive in common use. Lately, I have been running into the meaningful but not particularly uplifting Latin phrase, “memento mori” quite a bit, which translates into a reminder that none of us escape death.

We have borrowed quite a bit from Spanish and in more than our favorite foods. We don’t take time to think much about the origins of words like cafeteria, mosquito, ranch, cargo, and a Nebraska favorite, tornado. Those are all Spanish in origin. From German, a linguistic cousin to Yiddish, we have taken words like kindergarten, hamster, and surprisingly, noodle. Beyond the four prominent European languages, borrowed words become more entertaining. The word “Safari” is appropriately borrowed from Swahili; we know that Vodka comes from Russian and karaoke is Japanese, but I never knew that “loot” was Hindi.

However borrowed and mongrelized, American English is a vibrant and interesting language. Given the diverse spelling conventions accompanying those words, it’s understandable that the native language we take for granted is regarded as one of the more challenging languages to learn. “Foreignisms” reminds us of human communication’s complex, intertwined nature and how our languages have evolved. It’s a chronicle of how we have evolved, and sometimes, it’s fun to toss in a bit of Yiddish.