‘The Whole Megillah’ Becomes ‘the Whole McGillicuddy’

I live in the Hudson Valley and I’m moving. My wife and I have a good country lawyer to do the closing. Yesterday I was in his office and he leafed through the paperwork. "That’s the whole McGillicuddy," he said. I was surprised and pleased. Yiddish has become Americanized. He’d taken the great old Yiddish word for rigmarole, "megillah," and made it perfectly local. Thus have Jewish gifts been shared in the goldeneh medina–the promised land.