yiddish

There are couple of books by Leo Rosten, Joy of Yiddish and Joy of Yinglish, that teaches Yiddish words through jokes and anecdotes.

It's interesting that the yiddish word for expert is spelled similar to maven, which is also means expert in English.

Today the idea of live vaudeville Yiddish theatre in the USA is almost unfathomable.

On his first date with my grandmother, he wanted to take her to the Yiddish theatre in NYC.

You should be careful in the way that you use the word 'Chutzpah'—in English people usually use it to mean ballsiness, but in Yiddish it still means impudence, affrontery, gall.

In Yiddish (at least as spoken to me), it often has a masculine connotation.

My grandfather grew up in Brooklyn with Yiddish as his primary language.

And some of this Yiddish is still getting thru to my kids.

There's some suggestion that it comes from Yiddish style dialect.

As I understand it, there was already a language barrier in Yiddish vs.

The English word 'maven' has Yiddish origin.

If you make things a little broader, then you can include novels like the 2008 Hugo winner, _The Yiddish Policeman's Union_, which is classic Michael Chabon applied to alt history.

On a related note, there is highly educative book on Yiddish called: "If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Say It In Yiddish" by L.

Having grown up with a small sprinkling of Yiddish words in my parents' vocabulary, I agree with Sasha Baron Cohen's character in The Dictator, where he says "I like Yiddish, the words sound like what they mean".

:-) In essence, maven comes from Yiddish, and it means "one who accumulates knowledge".

Once you learn Yiddish words and the phrases, the sitcom dialogues started making more sense (like "from your lips to God's ears" or such turn of phrase).

There's a (I think Yiddish) expression: plan for the worst, because the best will take care of itself.

Yiddish curses put any other language's curses to shame.

Yiddish was the defacto language of many Zionist settlers.