Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Manuel.


A dreadful mantra ridden speech to rouse the camp followers.

Rhetoric to cause divisions.

He is devoid of any sincerity.

oh do stop shrieking from the same old tattered pamphlet ..... this is why you are so singularly dull for much of the time

iturama - i think they're synonymous; remember that much of yiddish is intrinsically "plattdeutsch" and passed on verbally

There is also a schlemiel and a schlemozzle.



Most of the definitions involve telling a story. They begin with "there was a man..." and end with "and this is a schlemozzle".

schlemiel is nowhere near as pejorative as schlock or schmuck, but rather more just a loser

schemozzle (sic) is something totally different ..... it's akin to something being a shambles - eg "it's a complete schemozzle" = "it's a total mess" or along those lines

A man is sitting in a restaurant eating his dinner. A beautiful woman walks in and asks if she can share his table. He promptly stands up. His napkin is trapped under his soup and the result is that his soup goes flying across the restaurant. This man is a schlemiel. On the other side of the restaurant there is a man eating his dinner when a bowl of soup lands on his head. This man is a schlemozzle!

A loser and a real loser.

Another definition

Schlemeel= one who constantly spills his soup

Schlemozzle= the guy he constantly spills it on.

not where i come from! :-)

yiddish, of which i know very little, is a very flexible language and remarkably descriptive ..... it is also pretty much phonetic, which is why one gets so many spelling variations

My sources are Stamford Hill where I went to school.

the hasidim clearly have their own version ..... either that, or you weren't listening again! :-)

In the 1920s my father used to be paid to go down the street and light the fires of all the orthodox Jews on the sabbath as they could do no work on that day.

The name for it is "A Shabbos goy, Shabbat goy or Shabbes goy".

it still goes on, and imo it's preposterous
you can't turn even turn on a light

from somewhere, i think i learnt that you weren't even meant to walk more than x-distance even to go to synagogue ...... this was circumvented in the usual rationalised (cheating!) manner, but i won't bore you with it

possibly, a goy being a gentile but not insulting, whereas a shiksa (which applies to girls) has very nasty connotations

Haystack , my grandmother lived in Stamford Hill i remember staying there as a small boy and walking to the shops with her and seeing the jewish boys with ringlets and skull caps and thinking it quite strange , i suppose i was about 6 at the time .

aka hasidim :-)

The modern equivalent is for orthodox Jews to leave the oven on Friday night. There have been a number of tragedies as a result, notably in New York.

Cynic
I know what it is called. It is an Eruv. They have one near me in Hampstead Garden Suburb. It is a continuous wire round the area. The effect is that anywhere inside, it is the equivalent of being at home. A bit of a cheat.

http://www.thejc.com/judaism/judaism-features/102301/how-eruv-liberated-families-shabbat