For those who love language - and who doesn't? - here's a copy of an article from the Yale Law Journal on Yiddish and the Law. An excerpt:
There is, of course, one obvious question that must be on every reader's mind at this juncture: what about "schmuck"? Regrettably, we were stymied in our schmuck search by the fact that many people are actually named Schmuck.[7] This is an unfortunate circumstance for researchers (and even worse for the poor Schmucks themselves).
We therefore can't report on the degree to which schmuck has worked its way into legal English, which is too bad, because schmucks are even more common in courtrooms than schlemiels, schmoozing, and chutzpah. We can, however, mention that there's a U.S. Supreme Court case named Schmuck v. United States. For what it's worth, the petitioner was a used-car dealer.[8]
And there's also People v. Arno, where the first letters of each sentence in a footnote spell out "schmuck" (apparently referring to the dissent). Harsh.
3 comments:
I don't think there's a more expressive language than Yiddish! And if you really enjoy the language, there's always the classic, The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten.
I don't know if I'd say the used car dealer was a schmuck - maybe because he was suing the United States.
A gonif he was more likely... :)
- J.
evieg - if you'd clicked on the link in the post, you'd see that it was an article written on a Jewish based informational site about the inclusion of yiddish expressions in law proceedings.
It's an interesting irony since yiddish is a language of inclusion that picks up on words and phrases from the country it's spoken in. Not the other way around.
One reason why my grandmother and mother couldn't completely understand each other since one was from a Jewish immigrant family from Poland, the other from a Jewish immigrant family in Russia.
Heck, even the cooking was different for the same traditional dishes!
I don't think Michael intended any insult - just his astute observation on the use of language as posted in an alternate blog article on law.
Trust me - Michael is a true mensch... :)
- Jeff
Thanks, Jeff.
I'll try to live up to that!
Michael
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