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Articles & Essays
A Yiddish / Hiberno-English Dictionary
by Sam Slote
Gey kakken oyf in yam (literally, ‘Go shit in the ocean’) – Feck off Gonif – Cute (‘crook’) Klutz – Eejit ( ‘a clumsy person’) Mazik – Chisler (‘a swift or mischievous child’) Mensch – Legend or Gobshite (one of few terms of endearment in Yiddish; mostly used in an ironic sense). Menuval – Gobshite (‘a disgusting person’) Meshuggeneh – Eejit (from the adjective meshugge, ‘crazy’) Momzer – Gobshite (literally, ‘a bastard’; figuratively, ‘an untrustworthy person’) Moyshe Pupik – Eejit (literally, ‘Moses bellybutton’; figuratively, ‘a jerk’) Nebech (in American Yiddish, Nebbish) – Eejit (‘To define a nebech simply as an unlucky man is to miss the many nuances, from pity to contempt, the word affords’, Rosten, p. 261) Nishtgutnik (in American Yiddish, No-goodnik) – Dosser (the opposite of alrightnik) Noodge – Gobshite (from the verb nudzh, ‘to bore’) Nudnik – Eejit (literally, ‘a pest’) Paskudnyak – Feckin’ Gobshite (‘nasty, odious, contemptible’; ‘one of the most greasily graphic’ words in Yiddish, Rosten, p. 282) Putz – Gobshite (literally, ‘penis’, although rarely used in the literal sense. In 1998 thensenator Al D’Amato was roundly excoriated for calling his opponent Chuck Schumer a ‘putz’) Schlemazel – Eejit ( ‘un unlucky person’; possibly the English slang word shemozzle – ‘an uproar, confusion’ – is derivative) I am indebted to Leo Rosten’s literally indispensible The Joys of Yiddish, New York: McGraw Hill, 1968.