What words do Jews use amongst themselves
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What words do Christians use amongst themselves? The answer is, it varies. Jews are not a monolithic bloc. Reform Jews living in the DC area are different than orthodox Jews in Brooklyn are different from any of the Jews living in Israel. Some would use slang terms in Yiddish. Some would use slang terms in Hebrew. Some would use your standard, traditional, good old American slang.
In other words, who are you talking about, and where?
In other words, who are you talking about, and where?
Thanks. I should of been clearer. I didn't intend to use the term in a religious sense. Yiddish, Hebrew, slang terms used by those who once lived mainly in the Northeast US and now reside in south Florida.
General term for a non-Jew is gentile. And that's about as far as it goes. I only know the Liberal Jew sector, so for the US, Middle Class liberal Jew sector, there aren't really any special Jewish slang terms and any that I know are from the general American public which are not deemed appropriate by the group anyhow.
If you're talking more conservative or in Isreal, I have no idea.
If you're talking more conservative or in Isreal, I have no idea.
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According to a Jewish friend, a derogatory term for blacks is "Schwartzer" (from the German/Yiddish Schwartz, meaning black).
A "fayguhluh" is a homosexual. A "schmeckel" is a penis.
Those are about the only few I know offhand. Here's a decent list of slang:
http://www.sillymusic.com/yiddish_dictionary_definitiions.asp
A "fayguhluh" is a homosexual. A "schmeckel" is a penis.
Those are about the only few I know offhand. Here's a decent list of slang:
http://www.sillymusic.com/yiddish_dictionary_definitiions.asp
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Graz this is not the way to research this.
Go read about Yiddish. At least read Rosten's The Joy Of Yiddish.
Here's why: you're getting lists of vocabulary out of context. You're not getting information about the register, about the spectrum of offensive/formality, and you're getting approximate spellings. Yiddish is usually written using Hebrew characters, so English spellings tend to be a little flexible.
Not this flexible.
Fagela literally means "little bird': it's offensive. It equates roughly to the offensiveness of faggot.
Schwartza isn't very offensive; it's roughly equivalent to saying "a Black guy." That said, it can be racist, depending on the context, and it usually is.
There are even ruder words--words which are rarely ever used. And there are words men don't use in front of women.
I think they use "goy" or "gentile" for non-Jewish people.
Also anything unclean is often referred to as "treife" as far as I know.
Other than that, it depends: Do they speak Hebrew, Jiddish, a different language?
Also anything unclean is often referred to as "treife" as far as I know.
Other than that, it depends: Do they speak Hebrew, Jiddish, a different language?
Goy = gentile. It's not offensive, but would not be used to /in front of most gentiles, because it's not polite, and also, for many Jews, there aren't that many non-Jews in their lives.
There are other words, in a wide spectrum for non-Jews. Some of them are offensive.
Traife means that food does not meet the kosher dietary laws. It's sometimes used in a humorous fashion to refer to people, but that's rare, and likely not going to happen with older generations.
"Should of?" "70's?" I sense the innocence of ignorance here, but watching this thread is like not being able to look away from a train wreck in progress. Dispite the patience shown by some, the spiral into xenophobia is fascinating.
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My aunt used the term all the time -- ironically. (She wasn't racist; two of her long term boyfriends were black -- and that's saying something back in the fifties.) But she had the awareness that the term had a racist tinge.
Richard Lewis as Prince John uses it in Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in Tights He sort of coughs it as an aside; It's an inside joke -- I remember wondering how many people outside of NYC or Hollywood got it.
Goy is quite common, also in a semi ironic fashion, even among secular Jews.
Yes; the plural is goyim.
It can be used affectionately, too. It's that thing about language needing context.
I've heard more than one mom tell a kid "Don't be such a goyishe kopf" or "Don't think/behave like a gentile," for instance with respect to appropriate behavior in a Jewish context. It's not insulting so much as a reminder of cultural differences.
If you want to browse a very well-written and amusing book on the subject (imho), look for 'Born to Kvetch', by Michael Wex. It talks a lot about actual meaning (shikse means 'non-Jewish girl') and cultural meaning (God forbid your son should marry one).
I think it is just the right amount of enlightening and self-deprecating, myself. Manages to side-step the whole PC thing, although how, I'm not sure. Maybe just humor.
I think it is just the right amount of enlightening and self-deprecating, myself. Manages to side-step the whole PC thing, although how, I'm not sure. Maybe just humor.
Actually, shiksa means "female drunkard." It's about the worst thing to say about a non-Jewish woman. Drinking to excess is profoundly not acceptable. The male version is shikker. Where goy is mostly neutral in connotation, shiksa is not; it is a complete condemnation that bears the semantic weight of slut, in terms of register.
Shikker is a drunken man or woman. p 323
shiksa is a woman or girl who is not Jewish. p325
Leo Rosten Hooray for Yiddish, Corgi edition, 1984 0552 12532 6
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Shakesbear, Medievalist's point was a) that the root of "shiksa" is "shikker" (true), and that b) "shiksa" has a more negative connotation than "goy" (also true).
Rosten (a wonderful novelist who was not actually a lexicographer) was citing current usage, not etymology. Because "shiksa" came to be used mean "the non-Jewish woman of whom I have a negative opinion" rather than "the female drunkard" in the late 19th century, "shikker" came to be used for female drunkards as well.
The corresponding term of disapprobation for "shiksa" is "shaygetz". "Goy" is a more value-neutral term.
Seconding the recommendation of Born to Kvetch and the works of Mordecai Richler as a good way to immerse oneself in the usages of North American Yiddish speakers.
Rosten (a wonderful novelist who was not actually a lexicographer) was citing current usage, not etymology. Because "shiksa" came to be used mean "the non-Jewish woman of whom I have a negative opinion" rather than "the female drunkard" in the late 19th century, "shikker" came to be used for female drunkards as well.
The corresponding term of disapprobation for "shiksa" is "shaygetz". "Goy" is a more value-neutral term.
Seconding the recommendation of Born to Kvetch and the works of Mordecai Richler as a good way to immerse oneself in the usages of North American Yiddish speakers.
Yeah . . . but the root of both words is right from German "to drink."
And if you search The Forward, as I did (It's one of my linguistic corpora) shiksa was historically used for non-Jewish women who drank or served alcohol, and is still used that way, as well as being used for a gentile woman. It's used this way as well in Yiddish literature.
Shiksa is pejorative except in very specific situations between people who are genuinely joking.
What I'm trying to communicate, and apparently not doing very well, is that words in any language carry baggage with them, and it's not the kind of thing you can pick up from a dictionary or casual requests. Yiddish has a history that is present in writing from the Middle Ages; it's a complex language in terms of connotations because it is a language of intimacy; there's a reason it's called mammaloshen; "Mother tongue."
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There is way too much to this language/culture to learn it in a thread. Have to agree with Medievalist here.
I had no idea. It sounded so innocent on Seinfeld.Medievalist said:
I think people too often think of Yiddish as "Jewish slang."
It isn't; it's a magnificent, robust language with a written history and centuries of literature. There are even subtle distinctions in terms of dialects, though those are disappearing. In some ways, because Yiddish has what linguists call a restricted vocabulary, words bear extra freight. They have a wide web of connotation.
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I think the best way of formulating the concept is to suggest that "Jewish slang" in North America includes some Yiddish words (and morphs of Yiddish words) and English-language sentence structures borrowed from Yiddish ("I should worry!" "He doesn't know from making shirts" and so on).
Yiddish, on the other hand, is a rich language hundreds of years old, as Medievalist says.
There's a lot more to Italian (and Sicilian) than what you hear on The Sopranos, and there's similarly a lot more to Yiddish than the few words people know from mainstream US and Canadian culture like "kvetch" and "putz" and "chutzpah".
Yiddish, on the other hand, is a rich language hundreds of years old, as Medievalist says.
There's a lot more to Italian (and Sicilian) than what you hear on The Sopranos, and there's similarly a lot more to Yiddish than the few words people know from mainstream US and Canadian culture like "kvetch" and "putz" and "chutzpah".