No
matter how little is generally known about Yiddish, there’s one aspect of the
language that pretty much everyone can agree on: Yiddish really delivers on the
swearing. In fact, it has a startlingly
vivid and at times highly specific array of insults, profanities and curses
that bring joy to even the most jaded shouter of obscenities. To be fair, Jews have had plenty to swear
about, so the sheer variety of options should be no surprise. What is
surprising, though, given my own love of swearing, is that I’ve not chosen to
talk about this before now. You see, my
desire to share as many appalling Yiddish curses as possible has been tempered
by a growing awareness that there has been a tendency for popular culture to
cast Yiddish as nothing more than an amusing series of dirty words. In fact, on several occasions, people have
told me that they themselves have considered learning Yiddish in order to swear
better, which is a sentiment I can admire, albeit one which misses so much of
what Yiddish actually has to offer. So,
in the spirit of having a good swear, it’s possible to look at what Yiddish
curses are all about without just reducing the entire shprakh to this single register of meaning.
The
problem is that the popular view of Yiddish is still dominated by its capacity
for inventive insults. A surprising
proportion of recently published books on the language tend to focus on this
aspect, which is undeniably entertaining, and does clear up the question of how
a shlemiel differs from a shlemazel,
but these all tend to break Yiddish down into a handful of individual words and
phrases rather than discussing it as a full language. This wouldn’t be a problem if there were other,
more comprehensive representations of Yiddish, but without the backdrop of the wider
culture, Yiddish is perceived as a zshargon
rather than a shprakh.
This
focus on swearing in Yiddish is so persistent that it’s worth asking where it
could have come from. I can’t remember
ever hearing anyone tell me they were thinking of learning Russian or Italian purely
for the cursing, although I did have a school friend who tried to learn French
to impress girls, which was an unexpectedly enterprising, if ultimately doomed
plan. However, Yiddish has a long
history of usage as “secret” communication, a way of speaking under the radar
in the UK at least. Alas, the growing prevalence
of US comedy on UK television in the 1990s meant that I could no longer insult
my university acquaintances with the same impunity I had enjoyed during secondary
school. As soon as everyone knows what putz and shmuck mean, you need to reinvent your code. Part of the issue is that Yiddish has never
been a language associated with power or authority. Despite its millions of pre-WWII speakers it was
never a national language, and since then it has needed to be flexible in order
to survive. Perhaps focusing on swearing
is a way of engaging with a marginalized language, since this gives it “purpose”
for a wider audience; or perhaps, given the turn of twentieth-century history, this
is the least painful way of talking around all that has been lost.
All
this means that I am reluctant to go full-throttle on the Yiddish swearing
here, at least in terms of just listing individual words. However, proper curses in complete, grammatical
sentences are another story. These give a
much clearer picture of how spoken Yiddish actually works; plus they have the
advantage of being more difficult for non-speakers to actually follow. My cursing sourcebook is The Dictionary of Yiddish Slang and Idioms by Fred Kogos, and while
I might take issue with his transliteration, I can’t fault his dedication to
the cause of profanity. As well as the
old standards, like Gey kakn aufn yam (“Go
shit in the sea”) and Kush mir in tokhes (“Kiss
my ass”), this collection reveals some unexpected trends in Yiddish insults. For a start, onions are a curiously popular
point of reference. Er zol vaksn vi a tsibele, mit dem kop in drerd (“May he grow like
an onion, with his head in the ground”) makes sense, since it taps into a
recurring theme in Yiddish insults of effectively finding imaginative ways to
wish your enemy dead. I have more
difficulty with Zol dir vaksn tsibeles
fun pupik (“May onions grow in your bellybutton”), because it’s so random
and yet so revoltingly corporeal. It
doesn’t take much imagination to picture all those little roots twining round
your kishkes. Geese are another common feature, with Gey strashen di gendz (“Go threaten the
geese”) being a particular favourite. Having
witnessed numerous goose attacks on unwary students, I can say that this is an
insult you wouldn’t take lightly.
While
geese and onions paint a charmingly pastoral picture of Yiddish life, there are
several insults that speak to a less wholesome existence, like Er krikht vi a vantz (“He crawls like a
bedbug”); while there is also a disturbingly precise set of physical curses,
like Zol er tsebrekhen a fus (“He
should break a leg”) and Zol dikh khapn
beym boykh (“May you get a stomach cramp”). Others are more random, such as Zolst geshvollen veren vi a berg (“May
you swell up like a mountain”) or Gey
fayfn aufn yam (“Go whistle in the ocean”). The more insults I read, the clearer the
picture of the world in which they were coined, full of unexpected ailments,
market gardening and angry wildfowl. As
wonderful as it is to translate English swearwords into Yiddish, the
unpredictable inventiveness of these “home-grown” insults is where the real pleasure
lies. Calling someone a momser is a good start (especially if they don't speak Yiddish), but even the
most inveterate swearer will recognise that this doesn’t even come close to the
glory of Ikh vel makhn fun dayne kishkes a
telefon (“I will make a telephone out of your guts”). It would appear that sometimes the old ways
really are the best.
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