Wednesday, March 26, 2008

oy! ¡ay! malarkey!

This week's A.Word.A.Day featured words from Yiddish. Anu Garg is brilliant and so is his site. I adore Yiddish words. I grew up on Long Island and may be a muttly half-Puerto Rican/half-Irish mix but I consider myself an honorary Jew all the same. Yiddish is full of onomatopoeia: klutz, schnook, schlep. The words have an inherent wryness.

And then there are quotes each day which make me happy:

I come from a people who gave the Ten Commandments to the world. Time has come to strengthen them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.
–Yehuda Bauer, professor (b. 1926)

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