A couple of weeks ago I read Goldwyn’s biography (really worth a read). Apparently his family lived in the house of a fishmonger and so there was a sign with a fish on it and the fish was painted gold or yellow (‘gelb’).
And if you were unlucky enough to live in a place that changed hands more than once, like Alsace-Lorraine or at the eastern rim of the Hungaro-Austrian empire, your name might have been forced through more than one change mutation. For example like getting a french version first and having it germanized later or vice versa.
In German it would be verkackte, from ver- + kacken (“to shit”), so basically your definition, but with ‘shit’ as the root word. I’d say generally German uses ‘shit’ more and English uses ‘fuck’ more for the same concepts. Schwitz, Schmutz, platschen, schleppen. schmaltz (both meanings) and alte Kacker (also using ‘shit’ as a root word) are German words with almost the same definitions as the ones in the video. [quote=“bibliophile20, post:14, topic:17716”]
Yes, Yiddish is a dialect of German… but it’s only a dialect. It’s more distinctive to the German ear than Valleyspeak or Southern Drawl is to English speakers–and with some significantly semantical differences (most of them rather vulgar).
[/quote]
‘Putz’ is a good example of that - as far as I know, Germans mostly use it to mean ‘plaster’ as a noun and ‘to clean/to plaster’ as a verb. I don’t think the German word has the sense of ‘dick’.
Another interesting one: Schmuck is ‘jewelry’ in German, but it gets a lot of its Yiddish meaning from the sense of ‘family jewels’.
My grandfather and his brother both went through Ellis Island but with different immigration officers. They both gave the same last name and received entirely different spellings of the name that persist today.
Gay guys have appropriated the use of fagele for themselves, little birds.
My dad told me my grandfather once had a meat stand in Lexington Market in Baltimore. Gay guys would gather in one corner and gossip excitedly in high voices. Dad said my grandfather would look at them bewildered and ask in yiddish, “Those little birds (fagele), what are they chirping?”
Of course it is difficult to quantify those things, especially as a non-native speaker, but I think an English speaker who wants to get a general idea of the level of similarity should look at something like Scots.
Lovely story, but probably not true. Names were not changed at Ellis Island. Whatever name was on the ship’s manifest is what was used.One or both of your family members changed their own name and have lied about it. One of many articles about it here.
And of course all the clerks at Bremerhaven were fluent in polish, russian, hungarian and so on and really, really cared about every name being written down without a fault. Right.
I much prefer the original tune for that song to the one most folks perform. A minor, contemplative, whistful rendering seems to suit the words much better than the bouncy version… it’s a farewell and a memory of days gone by, not a celebration.
Yeah, contemplative and whistful is the right tone. It’s a melancholy piece, so why on earth make it so bouncy and sickly sweet? And why did it became the new year’s eve song anyway?
In John McPhee’s In Suspect Terrain, he profiles Anita Harris (née Fishman). He describes how her father ‘in the old country was Herschel Litvak. In Brooklyn, he called himself Harry Fishman, and sometimes Harry Block. According to his daughter, English names meant nothing to Russian Jews in Brooklyn.’
Just another angle for seeing how those who had name changes imposed on them related to the situation.
Interesting, I never knew that. But then, I never gave Jingle Bells a second thought. And if I would have, my first guess would probably have been along the lines ‘this must have something to do with Morris dancers’.
Anyway, you got me reading up on it on Wikipedia, so now that I’m suddenly an expert my guess is, it’s a combination of
the mental images a horse drawn sleigh and all that snow invoke
it was perfect raw material for Hollywood hokum
and we all know that perception is reality.
What I really was delighted about was learnig that it was the first song broadcast from space. From Wikipedia:
“Jingle Bells” was the first song broadcast from space, in a Christmas-themed prank by Gemini 6 astronauts Tom Stafford and Wally Schirra. While in space on December 16, 1965, they sent this report to Mission Control: “We have an object, looks like a satellite going from north to south, probably in polar orbit… I see a command module and eight smaller modules in front. The pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit…” The astronauts then produced a smuggled harmonica and sleigh bells and broadcast a rendition of “Jingle Bells.” The harmonica, shown to the press upon their return, was a Hohner “Little Lady”, a tiny harmonica approximately one inch long, by 3/8 of an inch wide.
