On The Ubiquity of Yiddish words

      Schmuck. He’s a schmuck. Not a mensch.

      You know what I mean, right? Everyone, or almost everybody, knows what I mean.

      Or at least I’ve been thinking so. I’ve been thinking recently how many Yiddish words or expressions have become incorporated into the American vernacular. (This is, of course, the kind of thing you start thinking about when you’re retired, have too much free time on your hands and don’t want to think any more about politics.)

      It’s not as if Yiddish, the historical language of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, is a popular language these days in America—or for that matter, anywhere. At most, fewer than a quarter million of Americans today speak Yiddish, less than a tenth of one percent of the U.S. population. And probably 90 percent of those speakers are concentrated in the New York area.

      I grew up in New York, but didn’t know much Yiddish. My grandparents, who had emigrated from Latvia and Poland, apparently spoke it, but they all had died before I was born. My parents occasionally would sprinkle a word here and there into conversations—and sometimes communicate in Yiddish with each other when they didn’t want their children to understand—but the language was not a significant part of family exchanges.

      Many of the words, though, have become significant parts of conversations across America. Maybe it’s because New York, where so many immigrants landed before spreading across the county, has been the nation’s cultural nexus. Over time, like the immigrants, the language of those newcomers spread through the country and the culture. Through movies and television, radio and books and comedians and now podcasts, social media and streaming, Yiddish became embedded in our language—and not just in New York.

      Consequently, I think this: non-Jews and non-urbanites, residents of Idaho and Iowa and the Dakotas, now know, understand and use a number of Yiddish-derived words. I am reasonably convinced, without any statistical data to back up my claim, that the spread of Yiddish into English has been that widespread, sometimes often without speakers realizing the origins of the words they are speaking.

      To test my thesis, I recently asked a guy who is actually from South Dakota about this. What Yiddish words or expressions was he familiar with?

      Turns out, more than me. He knew all the words and expressions.

      But, then, he had gone to college in New York and had married a Jewish woman and, well, he probably knew more Yiddish words than the woman he married. Not a controlled experiment then.

     So, to test my theory, what I want to do now is ask you. I’ve compiled a list of what I think are the most common Yiddish words and expressions that have made it into English. (I was going to make the list alphabetical, but instead have decided to make it by descending order of what I think is familiarity).

      How well-known are these words? Do you know what all these words mean? Do you use them when conversing?

      And what do you think is the most used Yiddish word in the U.S. today?

      Be a mensch and write to us at writingaboutourgeneration@gmail.com and give us the whole megillah.

Oy

Schmuck

Glitch

Chutzpah

Klutz

Schlep

Spiel

Schmooze

Mensch

Kvetch

Schmaltz or schmaltzy

Oy vey

Tchotchke

Bupkis

Futz

Schmo

Schmutz

Plotz

      Oh, and I guess the most familiar Yiddish-derived English word of all: bagel. Want yours with a schmear?