last night. But you are fierce, you are a juggernaut. You hop on your train to the city for your day in the concrete jungle.
African Languages
Speaking to African languages as a broad group, which they are, English has taken the words banana, banjo, boogie-woogie, chigger (nasty, little tick-like things), goober (a.k.a. peanuts), gorilla, gumbo, jazz, jitterbug, jitters, juke (as in -box), voodoo, yam, zebra, and zombie.
Native American Languages
Lumping another vast and diverse group of people’s languages into one paragraph are the loanwords from North American natives. There are hundreds or even thousands of place names that use the words of the people that were driven out of them: Ottawa, Toronto, Saskatchewan (which boasts a town called Moosejaw), and the names of more than half the states of the US, including Michigan, Texas, Nebraska, and Illinois, even though it looks French. (The city of Detroit is French; it means “the narrows.”) Native American languages also gave us the food words avocado, chocolate, squash, pecan, potato, tomato, chili, and cannibal. There are animal names like chipmunk, woodchuck, possum, moose, and skunk. Plus canoe, toboggan, moccasin, hammock, hurricane, tobacco, tomahawk, and the turtles known as terrapins.
And now I’m hungry.
A brief detour for the word, squaw. You may have cringed when you read it. “ ‘Oh no,’ you say to yourself, ‘Squaw is a slur, like calling a Roma person a G*psy.’ ” That’s not wholly true, though. First and foremost, regardless of what a word is, where it came from, or what it meant originally, if that word is being used as an insult, then it is an insult. There are those who use the word squaw to demean Native women. That aside, people believe that squaw is inherently insulting because they have been told it comes from the Mohawk ojiskwa, a vulgar word for female genitalia. This etymology is highly unlikely, since in the Algonquin language family, squaw simply means “woman” or “young woman.” It was in no way pejorative and was even used in missionary translations of the Bible. It can be seen in that context in writings dating back to the 1600s. There is a movement in some Native American communities to reclaim the word and remove the stigma. As one Abenaki woman writes, “When our languages are perceived as dirty words, we and our grandchildren are in grave danger of losing our self-respect.”
Oy Vey!
Arguably, the best language to season the stew of English is Yiddish. Let’s start the explanation of what Yiddish is by telling you what it is not. Yiddish is not Hebrew. Though they are both historically used by Jews, share an alphabet that contains no capital letters, and are read from right to left, they are not the same language. One reason the two get mixed up in people’s minds is that Yiddish speakers usually learn to read Hebrew in childhood, since holy texts and prayers are written in classical Hebrew. However, this form of Hebrew is markedly different from the modern Hebrew spoken in Israel. You can think of Yiddish as the international language of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, who typically spoke it in addition to the dominant language in their area. Yiddish is referred to as mame loshn, or “mother tongue.” The word “Yiddish” is the Yiddish word for Jewish, so while it is technically correct to refer to speaking Yiddish as “speaking Jewish,” it is inadvisable to do so. At its height less than a century ago, Yiddish was understood by an estimated eleven million of the world’s eighteen million Jews. Now, due largely to WWII, three times more people speak Hebrew than Yiddish. Fewer than a quarter-million people in the United States speak Yiddish, about half of them are living in Texas. Just kidding, they are in New York. Where else was it going to be? In recent years, Yiddish has experienced a resurgence and is now being taught at universities, and there are Yiddish Studies departments at Columbia and Oxford.
Now, let’s get to the Yiddish you are speaking without even knowing it. To quote Bill Murray in the holiday classic Scrooged, “The Jews have a great word—schmuck. I was a schmuck. Now, I’m not a schmuck.” Schmuck is a word for the male member, as are putz, schvantz, and schlong. You use one of those to schtup. If you think I am being too bold, you might give me a slap on the tuchis. What can I say? I’ve got a lot of chutzpah. And it kills me to hear people say “chootspah.” Oy vey. When you see the ch, give it a hhhh sound. We should go out for a drink and a nosh, maybe a bagel and a schmear. Can you pay? I’ve got no money, bupkes. And can we drive? The coffee shop is a bit of a schlep. Nice place, I had a meeting there when I was trying to schmooze a new client. I go through my whole spiel and I am super nervous, feeling like a yutz. Finally, he says “Yeah, I like your shtick.” I don’t think I could work at a coffee shop, though. I’d be spilling drinks all over people, I am such a klutz. Plus, you hear these coffee mavens talk about this one’s Indonesian, this one’s Sumatra; they all taste like burned bean water to me. C’mere, you got a little schmutz on your face. There you go.
There are more, of course. Zaftig means having a pleasingly plump figure. Glitch is also Yiddish, though it originally meant a slip-up. Before we leave the Yiddishkeit, let’s look at the intro to the classic TV show Laverne & Shirley, “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!” A schlemiel is a fool. Schlimazel means a quarrel or a fight. Hasenpfeffer is not Yiddish; it’s a type of German stew, usually made with rabbit.
Fantabulosa
Another fascinating language added to our lexicon isn’t technically a language. Polari is a cant, a cryptolect, also sometimes called an anti-language, a system of slang based on the speaker’s native language, used only by a select group. For gay men in Britain before 1967, Polari was not just cute jargon; it was absolutely necessary. Being gay or even being perceived as gay could land you in prison for “gross indecency.” It was taboo to write or speak the words “gay” or “homosexual.” Gay people needed a way to talk about their relationships and the other aspects of their lives without being understood by eavesdroppers. Polari came about as a form of insider slang, built from different languages, shifting and changing as it evolved. Language professor Paul Baker summed Polari up in his 2002 book Polari—The Lost Language of Gay Men, it was a lingo of “fast put-downs, ironic self-parody, and theatrical exaggeration.”
Cockney rhyming slang replaces words with entire phrases, then shortens them. The word for telephone is dog. The first step was to rhyme something with “telephone,” which was the phrase “dog and bone.” That’s a bit wordy, so two-thirds of it was dropped. Likewise, “feet” became plates, through “plates of meat,” and “stairs” became apples through “apples and pears.”
Although Polari saw the height of its popularity in the mid-twentieth century, its roots are much older. A similar argot called Parlyaree had been spoken in markets and fairgrounds at least as early as the eighteenth century, made up partly of Romany words with selections from thieves’ cant and backslang—words that are spelled and spoken phonemically backward, such as yob for boy and riah for hair. It also included, by way of the theater, the “broken Italian” used by street puppeteers who put on Punch and Judy shows. Even the name Polari is an Anglicization of an Italian word, parlare, “to speak.” As its use spread, it picked up bits of French, Yiddish, Italian, Shelta (the language of the Irish Travelers), London slang, and Cockney rhyming slang, among others.
Besides being useful for discussing intimate business, Polari could be used to determine if someone else was gay. You could drop a few words into a conversation to see if the other person picked up on it. If they did not, no harm done. As such, the Polari glossary evolved to include a number of racy terms, so that people could set up rendezvous or discuss recent conquests without blowing their cover. Trade is a gay sex partner. TBH stands for “to be had,” which described that a person was sexually available, what we call today “DTF.” In Polari, an omi is a man, and a woman is a dona or a palone. An omi-palone is an effeminate man, or sometimes just a gay one. If you flip
