Is splanchnic just another word for schmuck?
Over on the Logic and Language blog, my recent postings on "splanchnic"
have elicited the quoting (by "logician") of a wonderful passage from
Jonathan Safran Foer's
Everything Is
Illuminated that allows us to connect words in "-nik" (which
"splanchnic" is not, though Roz Chast chose to treat it as if it were)
with the World Famous Eskimo Snowclone. Here's
the
text, very lightly edited:
October 27, 2005
400 Words for Splanchnik
Arnold Zwicky over at languagelog has had a
couple
of
posts
about the word "splanchnik" recently... and given languagelog's
fondness for jokes about the Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,... I
couldn't resist posting this excerpt from the novel I'm reading:
(Context: the Jewish-American hero-abroad is having a conversation with
his Ukrainian guide. I've retained the non-standard layout of
conversations from the original.)
"And I want to see what it's like now.
I don't think there are any Jews left, but maybe there are. And the
shtetls weren't only Jews, so there should be others to talk to." "The
whats?" "Shtetls. A shtetl is like a village." "Why don't you merely
dub it a village?" "It's a Jewish word." "A Jewish word?" "Yiddish,
like schmuck." "What does it mean schmuck?" "Someone who does something
that you don't agree with is a schmuck." "Teach me another." "Putz."
"What does that mean?" "It's like schmuck." "Teach me another."
""Schmendrik." "What does that mean?" "It's also like schmuck." "Do you
know any words that are not like schmuck?" He pondered for a moment.
"Shalom," he said, "which is actually three words, but that's Hebrew,
not Yiddish. Everything I can think of is basically schmuck. The
Eskimos have 400 words for snow, and the Jews have 400 words for
Schmuck." I wondered, what is an Eskimo? (p. 60 of Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan
Safran Foer.)
Meanwhile, here in Palo Alto I had breakfast yesterday with Jane
Robinson (the computational linguist) and Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky
(the firewalls and systems administration guru) and the utterly
adorable Opal Eleanor Armstrong Zwicky (the expert on language
acquisition), during which Jane announced that she'd just learned a new
word: yes, "splanchnic". Elizabeth and I gaped at her for a
moment (Opal wasn't paying attention, since she was busy exercising her
recently developed ability to compose sentences of more than two
words), and then I defined the word, to Jane's amazement. How did
I know that, she wanted to know. We explained.
Have I mentioned that "splanchnic" is on the tip of everybody's tongue
these days? Hardly a day goes by...
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 28, 2005 07:05 PM