In today's Wall Street Journal crossword puzzle, the answer to 25-Down, "Disgusted utterance," is F-E-H. This blew my mind. First of all -- and any Jew knows this -- one can never write the word "Feh!"
without using an exclamation point. Certainly one can never say
it without one. (Puzzle editor Mike Shenk, himself a Jew, should
know this.)
Secondly, while a little white girl in braids drives the lunatic left crazy about how we are stealing traditions from Native Americans, many Christians who have never even met a Jew say "Feh!" with abandon and nobody seems to mind. We have not staged any protests. (We are a forgiving, dare I say frightened, people.) But if a non-Jew saying "Feh!" is not an example of cultural appropriation, I don't know what is.
Then there are the bagels. Listen: Bagels are ours! The first known mention of the bagel was in 1610, in Jewish community ordinances in Krakow, Poland. Today they are as common and popular as pizza. (And by the way, I wonder how the Italians feel about that.) Insensitive to our feelings, white folks order their fluffy cinnamon-blueberry-cranberry-raisin bagels with a schmear, which implies
cream cheese, but who told them about a shmeer anyway? They must have heard it somewhere, which is why they spell it wrong.
And don't get me started on matzoh ball soup, which is today sold everywhere in jars and cans, instead of being made in a huge pot by a boobeh* sweating over a hot stove and then ladled directly into your bowl. (Whole Foods sells it and calls it Mom's, but it should of course be Grandma's.)
Too many Yiddish words creeping into our everyday lexicon are being misused, misspelled and mispronounced by all the goyim. (That's you guys.) Some examples are putz, cockamamy, oy vey and schmuck. Admit it: you'd be lost without those. And then there's "Who knew?" and "Go figure?" These expressions require a certain Yiddish inflection that's missing when used by WASP-y Anderson Cooper, who has said those things often on his TV show. I plotzed** when I first heard him, since both of those expressions were definitely invented by my grandmother and grandfather, Sarah and Izzy Keller, in their one-bedroom apartment in Queens in the 1950s.
In conclusion, if blacks can freak out over a white guy in dreadlocks, I can plotz over a goy eating lox with a shmeer. And by the way, lox is singular, not plural. It's not "Where are the lox?" or "How many lox do you have?" Oy vay is mere, Gottenyu!
* Grandmother
** To split, to burst, to explode, i.e. freak out
Secondly, while a little white girl in braids drives the lunatic left crazy about how we are stealing traditions from Native Americans, many Christians who have never even met a Jew say "Feh!" with abandon and nobody seems to mind. We have not staged any protests. (We are a forgiving, dare I say frightened, people.) But if a non-Jew saying "Feh!" is not an example of cultural appropriation, I don't know what is.
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| Not the real thing. |
And don't get me started on matzoh ball soup, which is today sold everywhere in jars and cans, instead of being made in a huge pot by a boobeh* sweating over a hot stove and then ladled directly into your bowl. (Whole Foods sells it and calls it Mom's, but it should of course be Grandma's.)
Too many Yiddish words creeping into our everyday lexicon are being misused, misspelled and mispronounced by all the goyim. (That's you guys.) Some examples are putz, cockamamy, oy vey and schmuck. Admit it: you'd be lost without those. And then there's "Who knew?" and "Go figure?" These expressions require a certain Yiddish inflection that's missing when used by WASP-y Anderson Cooper, who has said those things often on his TV show. I plotzed** when I first heard him, since both of those expressions were definitely invented by my grandmother and grandfather, Sarah and Izzy Keller, in their one-bedroom apartment in Queens in the 1950s.
In conclusion, if blacks can freak out over a white guy in dreadlocks, I can plotz over a goy eating lox with a shmeer. And by the way, lox is singular, not plural. It's not "Where are the lox?" or "How many lox do you have?" Oy vay is mere, Gottenyu!
* Grandmother
** To split, to burst, to explode, i.e. freak out
Hey, inflection is it. Such a genius you are. Look at my last line on my silly post, I mention midwesterners and southerners butchering the inflection. Such a nice blog.
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