This holiday season was nudnik season around my house. My father, who is deadly, used the Yiddish word to skewer a certain friend; and as a result I came to understand the word "nudnik" in all its glory. Nudnik means a bore and a pest. Webster’s says the root is Russian for boredom. Or in Leo Rosten’s definition, "A nudnik is not just a nuisance; to merit the status of nudnik, a nuisance must be a most persistent, talkative, obnoxious, indomitable, and indefatigable nag. I regard nudnik as a peerless word for the characterization of a universal type."
At one point over the holidays, my wife said, "Nudnik is you." Because I am something of a chatterbox; and she doesn’t suffer fools.
A few days ago my wife said, chozzerai, meaning b.s., and today she called me a luftmensch.
I said, "How much Yiddish do you know?"
My wife said, "A little. Yiddish is the language of New York."
I asked her to explain and she told me a story. When she first moved to New York from Philadelphia nearly 30 years ago, she interviewed with the literary agent Charlotte Sheedy, who was looking to hire an assistant, and Sheedy, who is Jewish, said something about the UJA, and my wife, instead of doing the right thing and pretending that she understood, said, What’s the UJA? Sheedy didn’t like my wife, my wife says, regarding her as an arrogant WASP, and she gave her a curt lecture about, If you’re going to work in New York, then you have to know that kind of thing.
Needless to say, my wife didn’t get the job. But she did get the lesson. She and her two sisters have all worked closely with Jews, and all of them can throw around Yiddish words.
For me the lesson of the story is that in taking a place in the US establishment, we have shared our gifts and changed America and ourselves. You can’t go backwards into parochialism.
So what is UJA?
United Jewish Appeal.
====================
God, we’ve used the term nudnik in our family since I was three.
The lesson could be that if people are expected to know Yiddish words in order to be accepted in certain social circles, this gives an advantage to those who grew up hearing Yiddish from their parents. In other words, knowledge of Yiddish is a kind of shibboleth, and could function as a class barrier. That’s not a “gift”; it’s what dominant classes always do to exclude outsiders, or at least to make it more difficult for them to join.
It reminds me of this graf from Lewis Lapham’s Money and Class in America:
“The old rich recognize themselves by faint and subtle signals–a tone of voice, a name in common, a summer at Fishers Island, the placement of a bunker below the thirteenth green at a golf course in Southampton.”
Yeah, Scott, there’s definitely that code, such as when you use, and how you pronounce, the word “terribly;” or your particular use of the word “charming,” one use is the marker; and how you will be written off if you describe anyone as “nice.”
BenjaminGeer,
I always thought (when I was living in NYC) that it was because it was the language of the schmata business, 7th Avenue, and because of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a New York Living treasure, who always wrote in Yiddish and who gave the language — even though no one could read it, they read the translations — a literary quality. This was particularly true after he won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Slang isn’t high-falutin’. And Yiddish doesn’t function in Manhattan as something that creates classes, or delineates one. The Italian deli guy will ask if you want a schmear (cream cheese) on your bagel as easily as saying cawfee for coffee. It’s just New York.
No cultural practice is high-falutin’ in itself; it’s the way it’s used that makes it high-falutin’. Moreover, the “same” cultural practice can have different meanings and functions for different classes. I remember many years ago going to a concert of the Modern Jazz Quartet, in a splendid concert hall. I had loved their music for years, and for me, jazz wasn’t something high-falutin’. I was in jeans, and didn’t particularly notice that everyone else in the audience was very formally dressed. At one point during an exciting solo, I whooped with enthusiasm. I quickly realised my mistake when the rest of the audience, which was listening in solemn silence, started at me in shock and disapproval. For them, it was something high-falutin’.
In Philip’s wife’s anecdote above, a literary agent gave her a “curt lecture” for not knowing something about Jewish culture in New York. If you can be given a curt lecture for not knowing something, that usually means that there’s some kind of exclusion going on. The curt lecture is a warning that if you don’t acquire the necessary knowledge, you won’t be welcome in some particular group. In sociology these are called “calls to order”, i.e. explicit or implicit warnings about norms to be obeyed. They include things like the disapproving stares I got at the Modern Jazz Quartet concert, as well as utterances like “What?! You’ve never read X?!” Note that in the story above, Philip’s wife implicitly puts Yiddish in the more general category of Jewish shibboleths that she had to acquire in order to be accepted by people like that literary agent.
A few years back, there was a great article in the WSJ (a page one feature) about how Yiddish had become the slang of Manhattan. When I was married to a Jewish wife, I took pride that I knew more Yiddish slang than she did. It’s a great language. Oh, by the way, Obama is a freier.
But if you want a real shockeroo, read “How the Irish Invented Slang” and discover what Daniel Cassidy discovered in 2000, and managed to write about before he died from cancer in 2008. The real slang of Manhattan, and subsequently America, is Irish and the list of words that not even the dictionaries know the etymology of is astounding…all traceable back to Gaelic, and coming out of the great irish immigrations starting in 1850. It was the slang of 20th C. midtown, downtown, and the boroughs too, memorialized in every great movie, and thereby spread across the land.
Yiddish is a late-comer, but it lies on top of the Irish inventions like a candied flower on a vast cake.
Found this from “Last Word with Matt Cooper”
I have some doubts about this. ‘Lucrum’ for instance is Latin for ‘gain’. But then there are many words which spread around the Indo-European languages. The Hittite for ‘water’ is ‘water’.
MHughes976,
Right but as someone mentioned in the comments to the clip above, Words such as “lucre” were introduced into Ireland by the Norman French. The very familiar Irish “bally” prefix is, etymologically “villa.”
The thing is that what Cassidy discovered from an old Gaelic dictionary (Focloir Poca) left him in a will, and working with Irish language experts from Glucksman Ireland House at NYU and University College Cork, was that the pronunciation of these Gaelic words in Erse as it was spoken in the US equaled the American slang that the linguists had never been able to find the origin of. Cassidy’s book is basically an expansion of the Focloir Poca, with the etymology of nearly every word in it included, and referenced, footnoted; the original dictionary had Irish examples of usage. He also tracks the movement of the famine immigration groups from NYC, up and down the eastern seaboard, and through to the South. The Irish were the white slaves, the maids, and stevedores — remember “Irish need not apply?” — and lived in ghettos, where they developed a version of English all their own that evolved from Gaelic. Cassidy, himself, remembered some of it from his childhood where this working class dialect was spoken, which he subsequently worked hard to get rid of.
The book is fascinating.
E.g., snazzy, ballyhoo, lulu, slum, crony, slugger, scam, fluke, nincompoop, slew,
skedaddle, lollygag–the onomatopoeic resonance of such Irish derivative slang words
is something in common with Yiddish, as Cassidy pointed out.
Thanks to WBAI’s Beyond the Pale we know that “nogoodnik” is a (recent) American Yiddish term that everyone understands. The language continues to evolve.
Pingback: Hugh Jackman Hot in New York | Buzz Foto | Paparazzi As An Art Form! | Hugh Jackman Celebrity Monitor