freier

Treppenwitz has a hilarious post about the Israeli fear of being a freier (sucker, chump), and how he got even at the supermarket.

What is the origin of this slang term?

There are a few theories.

Rosenthal (entry פראייר) says it comes from the German freier, meaning "suitor, bachelor". He says that the word went from German to Yiddish, where it came to be viewed negatively, "a person lacking social and financial confidence", and eventually came to mean "a person easy to deceive, take advantage of."

A commenter on this Haaretz article explained the development this way:

As with much modern Hebrew slang, `freier` is derived from Yiddish where it originally meant a "suitor" (it`s still used that way in Alsatian Yiddish) but came to mean the "customer of a prostitute." and eventually just a `sucker`.

Others say that it derives from the German word freiherr - a title of nobility. The Wikipedia article for Fraier has the following explanation (the English entry was a too literal translation of the Hebrew one, so I've adjusted it for clarity):

It is possible that the word was chosen because of the prominent German tone of the word, in order to suggest the local stereotype that the Israeli Jews that originated from Germany were too [accepting] of authority, [sticking] to firm and formal rules [at the expense] of flexibility, [quick-wittedness] and improvisation.

Another theory, presented by a linguist friend of mine, says that:

It's from Russian criminal slang, from Yiddish. The Jewish mafias in Odessa called non-criminals freiers. It's Yiddish for "free-ones". From the Jewish gangs it made its way into general Russian culture. It's mentioned in The Gulag Archipelago, where it is noted that the criminals in the gulag called the political prisoners freiers. But I was told that it's use is much wider than that; i.e. not just for non-criminal prisoners, but for all non-criminal classes in society.

So we have three very different etymologies here. My personal wish? That Israelis would worry more about the origin of the word, and less about how to avoid being one...

daven

As you may have noticed, one of the new "categories" on this site is Yiddish. The etymology of many Yiddish words is fairly easy to determine - they either come from German or Hebrew, or perhaps a Slavic language. But as we saw earlier with bensch, when it comes to the earliest Yiddish words, it's harder to make a clear cut decision (we'll see it later with cholent.) And because Yiddish is really a language of the people, it is not surprising that many folk-etymologies have popped up with these early Yiddish words.

Today we'll look at daven (or davenen) - to pray. I'll start off with some of the folk etymologies. This article provides a bunch:

• from the Aramaic “d’avhatana” דאבהתנא (or d'avunon דאבונן) , meaning “from our fathers.”
• from Hebrew “daf” דף , meaning “page”, so that “dafnen” would mean “to turn the pages.”
• Some say that “daven” originally meant to say the morning prayer, and hence look either to the English “dawn” or to Middle High German for “tagewen”, meaning “to do one’s morning chores” or “digen” meaning “to request.”
• from the Arabic “da’awa”, meaning “to pray”
• the Lithuanian word “davana”, meaning gift
• from Middle High German “doenen”, meaning to sing
• from the Hebrew “davav” דבב , generally translated as “to move the lips” or “to speak”.

There are other theories that the word comes from Greek or Turkish.

As you might guess, the multitude of theories decreases the likelihood of anyone of them being correct. And in fact many Yiddish scholars say that the origin of daven is unknown.

But the theory that makes the most sense to me, and seems to be the most widely accepted, is that daven is related to the English word "divine".

The 1922 article The Derivation of "Daven-en" by A. Mishcon gives a good explanation:

The suggestion which I venture to make is that the origin of our word is to be traced to Latin rather than any of the languages mentioned before. Daven is, in my opinion, a variant of the Latin Divin from which we get our term Divine Service. In support I would cite the following
analogies :

1. Another Yiddish word which, according to Bernstein (op. cit.), is used by Jews in Germany in exactly the same sense as Daven-en is Oren; this, of course, is formed from the Latin ora-pray-with the addition of the German infinitive ending en.

2. The Yiddish word Benschen, which means to pronounce a liturgical benediction and is so closely akin to daven-en, is likewise derived from the Latin benedice (evidently through the Italian) with the addition of the same suffix en.

It therefore seems quite feasible that, like its two allies, our word, too, has a Latin origin. Thus,

Ora +en = Oren.
Benedice +en = Benschen.
Divin +en = Daven-en.

dreidel

What is the origin of the Yiddish word dreidel?

From this site:

The word "dreidel" is a Yiddish word built on the German word drehen "to spin, turn." This word is related to English "throw," which originally meant "to turn or twist." Albanian tjer "I spin" as well as Latin torquere "to spin," whence our words "torque" and "torment," are also cousins.

In pottery, "to throw" still means "to turn":

the Old English word thrawan from which to throw comes, means to twist or turn. Going back even farther, the Indo-European root *ter- means to rub, rub by twisting, twist, turn. The German word drehen, a direct relative of to throw, means turn and is used in German for throwing. Because the activity of forming pots on the wheel has not changed since Old English times, the word throw has retained its original meaning in the language of pottery but has developed a completely different meaning in everyday usage. Those who say they throw pots are using the historically correct term.

How did throw go from "to turn, twist" into "to project, propel"? The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests that "the sense evolution may be via the notion of whirling a missile before throwing it."

As an aside - the original meaning of the "nun" "gimmel" "heh" and "shin" was not "nes gadol haya sham" נס גדול היה שם. The letters were rather:

a mnemonic for the rules of a gambling game played with a dreidel: Nun stands for the Yiddish word "Nichts" (nothing), hei stands for "Halb" (half), gimel for "ganz" (all), and shin for "steln" (put in).

The Yiddish, in turn, came from a German game, which had the letters N, H, G and S.

latke

What is the etymology of latke (or latka) - the potato pancake customarily eaten on Chanukah?

This site provides the following etymology:

In any event, the Yiddish לאטקע (latke) came from the Ukrainian оладка (oldka), which several online dictionaries faithfully translate as pancake, fritter, flapjack, and the like (muffin seems to be in there too for some reason). This is a diminutive of the Old Russian оладья (olad'ya).
Now it gets interesting: this comes from the Greek ελαδια (eladia), plural of ελαδιον (eladion), meaning "a little oily thing", "a little oil", or "a young olive tree". Which proudly paves the way to eladion being a diminutive of elaion, "olive oil", which in turn comes from elaia, the (Ancient) Greek for "olive".

So, centuries later, five languages away, and twice miniaturised, we get our "little tiny things made of (olive) oil" - latkes.

This article in The Forward gives a little more background on the latke:

The distance from the Yiddish latke to the Greek elaion is about as vast as Diaspora itself, but the relationship is interesting because the first latkes were little cakes made from curd cheese and fried in butter or olive oil. (Eating cheese on Chanukah is said to refer to the Apocryphal story of Judith, who fed salty cheesecakes to the Syrian general Holofornes to make him thirsty, and then plied him with wine until he was so inebriated she could chop off his head with a sword; this symbolic connection, though, was not made until many centuries after the first cheese latkes.) As Jews began to migrate eastward into Eastern Europe, butter and oil grew increasingly precious and expensive, and poultry fat became the chief frying agent; this made the use of cheese off-limits, and so by the Middle Ages latkes were most often made not from dairy ingredients but rather with a simple batter made from buckwheat flour (recall the original Russian meaning of "a flat cake made from unleavened wheat flour").

One thing that neither of these articles mentions is that the English words "olive" and "oil" both derive from elaion (as do parts of the words petroleum and Vaseline). So while the custom of eating latkes might not go back to olive oil, certainly the name of the word does...

bensch

Yesterday we discussed the Hebrew bracha - today let's look at the Yiddish equivalent - bensch ( or bentsh / bentsch / bentch). It means to bless, make a bracha in general, but when used without any qualifier usually refers to birkat hamazon (the blessing after the meal.)

While most Yiddish words derive either from Hebrew or German, with some others from the Slavic languages, bensch (or bentshn in the infinitive) is one the few to derive from Latin, and perhaps therefore one of the earliest Yiddish words.

The Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich wrote that Jews came to Germany from two main areas - France and Italy. Each group of immigrants brought words of their own. From Old French we get what Weinreich calls "western laaz" and from Old Italian "southern laaz". And so, bensch derives from the Old Italian benedicere (or benedictere), meaning "to bless". German also borrowed from the same Latin root for their word benedeien.

The English word "benediction" also derives from the same Latin root:

1432, from L. benedictionem (nom. benedictio), noun of action from benedicere "to speak well of, bless," from bene "well" + dicere "to speak"

Interestingly, the word eulogy has a similar etymology, although via Greek, not Latin:

from Gk. eulogia "praise," from eu- "well" + -logia "speaking"

So looking back at yesterday's post, the word bensch seems to fit a blessing from man to God, for those who understand it as meaning "praise".

boidem

The Hebrew word for "attic" is boidem (or boydem) - בוידם. Actually, it's more of a crawl-space, as described here: "created by a lowered ceiling usually running along the corridor, with an opening in the bathroom, above the door".

The word entered Hebrew via Yiddish, but originated in German as dachboden. Dachboden literally means "floor (boden) of the roof (dach)".

Dach comes from a root meaning "to cover" and is related to the English words thatch and stegosaurus.

The word boden derives from an earlier sense meaning "ground, earth, soil" and is connected to the words bottom and embed.

pareve

After yesterday's post about lishkah, I thought I'd try to tackle a big etymological mystery that may have a connection.

The word is pareve (or parev or parve or parevine) פרווה and it means food that is neither meat nor dairy. Stahl quotes a journal that came up with no less than 15 different answers to the question: what is the origin of the word pareve? He doesn't give their answers, so I'll list here what I can pull up.

Menachem Mendel wrote about this a few months ago. After quoting some theories (which we'll review) he writes:

Thanks to some of what I found on the web I arrived at an article by David L. Gold, an authority on Yiddish. The article's title is "Towards a Study of the Origins of Two Synonymous Yiddish Adjectives: Pareve and Minikh" in Jewish Language Review 5 (1985). Gold's conclusion is that the origins of pareve are probably Latin by way of Czech and Polish. The Latin word par means pair. In Czech we find parovy and in Polish parowy. Pareve foods can be "paired" with either milk or meat. Since Latin did not influence either Czech or Polish until the Christinization of their countries, Gold dates these words to no earlier than the ninth or tenth centuries and that "there would be no problem of chronology if we posited that pareve is of immediate Czech or Polish origin." In Gold's opinion "the Polish-Czech hypothesis is the only one tenable one in light of currently available data."

A commenter that post, Joe in Australia had another suggestion:

I always assumed that it meant "little" or inferior (Latin parvus). That is, it referred to things like bread that had not been improved with dairy or animal fats.

A good source for etymologies of Yiddish words is the Mendele discussion list, where Les Train wrote:

I understood that pareve came from Old Czech or Old Polish, and ultimately from the Latin parus - meaning equal, neither more to one side than to another (latin par- and slavic ov-/ev- suffix). Thus, pareve means neither here nor there; just as much milekhdik as fleyshik.

Also on Mendele, Alan Astro wrote:

Professor Herbert H. Paper once suggested that etymologically pareve may be related to French pareil ("same, similar"; the final L is not pronounced as an L but as a y glide). Other Romance words in Yiddish also occur in the religious sphere: bentshn, tsholnt, orn ("to pray" in Western Yiddish), leyenen (which would include reading from the Torah). In modern French, c'est pareil is commonly used to mean "it doesn't matter which one."

Another good list is Mail-Jewish. Perets Mett wrote in 2005:

The Yiddish word for steam is 'pa-re' - surely from a Slavic root. Now steam has no taste smell or colour, it is truly neutral. So anything which is neutral is 'steam-like' or 'pare-v' using the 'v' adjective marker.

(On Mendele, Reuven Frankenstein expanded on this idea by saying that pareve meant "cooked in steam, neither with butter, nor with lard".)

In 1994 Stuart Einbinder wrote:

I was told many years ago that the etymology of the word pareve was from the Spanish verse "PARa todo los VEces" ("for all times"), meaning that the food could be eaten at all times.

Also that year, Rabbi Shalom Carmy wrote:

I suspect that Parve means "poor" from the Latin. The Masora Gedola is called, in Latin, Masora Magna; Masora Ketanna=Mesora Parva.

And in response to a query of mine in 1999, Joseph Geretz wrote:

There was a chamber in the Bais Hamikdash (Holy Temple) called the Bais HaPareve (the Pareve chamber). This chamber was half in the Ezras Kohanim and half in the Ezras Yisrael, 'neither here nor there' so to speak. Therefore, the term Pareve has come to mean neither meat nor dairy.

This connects back to lishkah, for it was also known as Lishkat HaParva. According to Jastrow under פרווה:

Parva, name of a Persian builder and magian, from whom a compartment in the Temple was supposed to have been named.

Another Temple related explanation is from Macy Nulman in The Encyclopedia of the Sayings of the Jewish People, as quoted in The New Joys of Yiddish:

Pareve is derived from parbar, a Talmudic word pertaining to a small passageway in the Temple that "helped to make the whole Temple court fit for the consumption of most holy sacrifices and the slaughter of minor sacrifices."

The Hebrew word here is פרבר, also spelled פרור. Klein defines it as "a structure attached to the Western side of Solomon's temple", and from here we get the modern Hebrew word for suburb - parvar - (I assume due to the way the suburb is "attached" to the city).

Aish HaTorah also has a couple of suggestions:

The Yiddish word "Pareve" may have its roots in the Hebrew word "Pri" - meaning fruit. Fruit is, of course, neither dairy nor meat. In Yiddish, "ve" is frequently added when turning a noun into an adjective.

Alternatively, in old French, "parevis" is the term used for a vacant lot in front of a Temple. This vacant lot stands between the mundane street and the sanctified house of worship. Similarly, Pareve food lies between the two extremes of dairy and meat.

How many do we have so far?

Of course it is clear that the more suggestions we find, the less likely it is that we can say with certainty that one is correct. But the "correct" answer isn't really what interests me this time. What this really shows is just how interesting etymology can be - to the point that everyone wants to come up with a possible answer. If there weren't words like pareve, it wouldn't be nearly as fun...

kuter

In my post about words that begin with קט and had the meaning "to cut", I didn't mention the root קטר. It doesn't seem to be associated with the other words. It originally meant smoke, and is the root of the word ketoret קטורת - meaning incense. In modern Hebrew it gave rise to the word kitor קיטור - steam.

Therefore, when I would hear people use the root קטר as a verb - l'kater - and referring to someone who was whining or complaining, I always assumed it meant someone "blowing off steam." However, the origin is something else entirely.

The slang term derives from the Yiddish word for male cat - kuter. The sounds a male cat makes are similar to those of a whiner and grumbler. So you can call someone like that a kuter קוטר in Hebrew, and ask them to stop complaining already - תפסיק לקטר כבר tafsik l'kater kvar!

tzimmer

As the summer begins, we see a lot of Israelis looking for a צימר tzimmer - usually in the North. What does the word mean?

In Modern Hebrew, it refers to a country guest house - a "Bed and Breakfast". The word comes from the German zimmer - meaning "room". (By "room" I mean "an area separated by walls or partitions from other similar parts of the structure or building in which it is located" - in Hebrew חדר - cheder; I don't refer to "a space that is or may be occupied" - in Hebrew מקום makom. There is a story of an American man driving in Israel, who when stopped by a female hitchhiker, mistakenly said "yesh li cheder" יש לי חדר when he meant "yesh li makom" יש לי מקום...)

Zimmer has the same source as the English word timber, since most rooms in Germany were made of wood.

toosh

One of the weird things to happen when learning a language is when you think a word means one thing, and you find out it means something else.

For example, I bet I'm not the first immigrant to do a double take when he heard an Israeli refer to a marker as a טוש toosh. Even the most assimilated Jews in America know that tush is Yiddish for buttocks. So what's the connection?

Well, first of all, there is no connection - the words are just homonyms. Let's look at each part.

Tush comes from the Yiddish tokhes, from the Hebrew תחת tachat - bottom. The transformation does not seem to be a natural one. I found two postings on the Mendele list that gave theories as to its development.

In 1995 Zellig Bach wrote:

The accepted substitute in English for "tokhes" has been _tushie_ or_tushy_, apparently formed, according to Steinmetz, on the basis of a baby-talk diminutive. This word was then shortened to "tush," as in Mel Brooks' classic movie "Blazing Saddles," where a women bar singer by the name (I believe) of Von Push, in a satirical spoof of a Marlene Dietrich seductive song, rhymed "push" with "tush."

And in 2004, Enrique E. Gildemeister wrote:

"Nebbish" is the Western Yiddish pronunciation of "nebekh". But, could it be that, like "tush" for "tokhes", "nebbish" is used by East European immigrants' children because _kh_ does not exist in American English? Maybe the similarity with Western Yiddish is just a coincidence.

And what about the marker known as toosh? It comes from the German tusche:

NOUN: A black liquid used for drawing in lithography and as a resist in etching and silk-screen work.
ETYMOLOGY: German, back-formation from tuschen, to lay on colors, from French toucher, from Old French tochier, touchier, to touch. See touch.

The two other common terms for marker in Israel are לורד lord (originally a brand name) and מרקר mahrker - most prominently seen in the Israeli business publication TheMarker (pronounced in Hebrew as de-marker and written דהמרקר).

Another meaning of toosh in Hebrew is shower head. Another pronunciation is doosh, and according to this site, both are correct. They both originate in the European word douche, which is related to the Italian doccia meaning "shower," and is a etymological cousin of aqueduct.

kumzits

It is very common around the Lag B'Omer bonfire to have a sing-along called a kumzits (also spelled kumzitz or kumsitz). As this article describes, kumzits is an unusual word. On the one hand, it is widely known that the origin is from Yiddish for "come [and] sit". However, the word does not appear in Yiddish dictionaries. Why is that?

It turns out that kumzits is a Yiddish word that exists only in Hebrew. It was adopted by the early pioneers in Israel, despite the establishments opposition to use of Yiddish words. Hebrew replacements were suggested such as shevna שבנא - "please sit" and the Talmudic tozig טוזיג. But nothing ever managed to displace kumzits from its place beside the fire.

pulke

The Yiddish term for "chicken leg" or "drumstick" is pulke (פולקע), and it has entered Hebrew as well (פולקה). Stahl writes that the origin is in the Russian word pol, meaning half or side. This root is found in a number of Slavic languages, including Czech, where it appears as pul. This is the source of the dance Polka - which according to this site, is Czech for "half-step", referring to the rapid shift from one foot to the other.

On this site we find that pul derives from a more ancient Indo-European root meaning "split or half", which leads to many words in the various languages of the Indo-European family, including such words as split and splice.

balagan and blech

This is actually not the story of a Semitic root, but rather of an Indo-European one - and maybe two. But since this is Balashon, we will examine the root via Hebrew and Jewish words.

Answers.com defines a blech as:

A blech (from Yiddish) is a sheet of metal used by many observant Jews to cover stovetop burners on Shabbat (The Jewish Sabbath), as part of the precautions taken to avoid violating the halakhic prohibition against cooking on the Sabbath.

What is the origin of the term? In German, blech means "sheet metal". This site points out that the origin is the Indo-European root bhelg or bhleg, meaning “sparkle” or “shine" - I suppose because of the shiny nature of sheet metal. This root is the source of dozens of words including bleach, bleak, blind, blond, blank, blush, blue and even black (shine leads to burn, and burnt leads to black).

Another Hebrew word that comes from an Indo-European root is balagan. It entered Hebrew from Russian, and means a chaotic mess. According to this site, the etymology is as follows:

"balagan" is Hebrew/Yiddish/Polish "mess" - Russian/Turkic "wooden house" - Persian balakhaana "external room". But "balakhaana" can be derived from OIE (Old Indo-European) *bhelg which means "wooden plank". This ancient word's direct descendant in English is "bulk". And from this same root we have the Polish word "belka" (direct decendant) and the English "balk" (came via Old-Norse) - both have the meaning of "wooden beam", "girder", "tie-beam", "rafter" - (compare "fulcrum" which is a Latin relative to these two words).An even more interesting, the English word "balcony", Polish "balkon" (which came to both our languages from Old Italian (to Polish via French) where it came from Old Germanic, and which means "wooden platform", "scaffold". Although the word "balcony" does not come directly from the Parsian "balakhaana", but it is a similar type of derivative in another ancient language belonging to the same family, and nowadays it still keeps the similar sound and meaning.

So bhelg/bhleg can mean both "shine" and "plank or beam". Perhaps they are two separate roots that appear very similar. Or maybe burning wood leads to shine and glow? (This site - s.v. Fulginiae - maybe hints that it does.) Does anyone have any decisive information one way or another?

gebrochts

Some Jews will not eat anything cooked with matza on Pesach - including matza meal. (I'm not included in that group, BH.) They refrain from eating any food that is gebrocht. (The Hebrew term is matza shruya, but since this custom originated in Eastern Europe, the Yiddish name is used much more.) When I asked about the etymology of the term, someone guessed that perhaps it was related to bracha - blessing. That's not correct, but we'll get back to that association later.

The term gebrocht means broken - as one would break matza into soup. As this site explains, "The past participle of Yiddish verbs is formed by adding the prefix ge- and the ending -(e)n or -t to the base of the verb." So gefilte fish is filled (stuffed) fish: "ge-fill-t". And broken matza is "ge-broch-t". Since German and English are closely related languages, we can easily see how these words developed.

A slang term for bankrupt is "broke", and this leads to a question that appears on those list of silly questions floating around the internet: Why the man who invests all your money is called a broker?

Take Our Word For It explores the origins of the term broker:

One school connects it with tapping into or broaching a wine cask in order to sell the wine - in fact, this school claims that broker derives from the same source as broach. Both words supposedly come from French broche "awl" (from Latin broccus "projecting"). The Latin derives possibly from Gaulish, as there is an apparent Gaelic cognate: brog "awl". Incidentally, even if broker does not derive from the French broche, the word brooch (which was spelled broach until quite recently) certainly does.
Another school propounds the theory that the word comes ultimately from an Arabic source. The Anglo-Norman form of the word is thought to have been brocour, and a variant was abrocour. There was a Spanish word alboroque "sealing of a bargain" as well as Portuguese (one of the most interesting sources of English words) alborcar "barter", both likely coming from Arabic (with the al representing the Arabic definite article). Earnest Weekley notes that we see the Spanish word as early as 1020 and that its derivation from Arabic (or Hebrew) is supported by the fact that many brokers in the Middle ages were Arabs or Jews.
Weekley notes another possible explanation (though he favors the Arabic source): Anglo French broucour "one who broaches a wine cask and sells the wine". There was a variant, abroucour, whose Medieval Latin equivalent was abbrocator, and this may have been confused with or influenced by Medieval Latin abbocator "a broker" or literally "one who brings a buyer and seller mouth to mouth", boca being Latin for "mouth".

What Arabic root are they referring to? The American Heritage Dictionary gives the following etymology:

Middle English, from Anglo-Norman brocour, abrocour; akin to Spanish alboroque, ceremonial gift at conclusion of business deal, from Arabic al-barka, the blessing, colloquial variant of al-baraka : al-, the + baraka, blessing, divine favor (from braka, to bless)

So you can see there is at least one theory that provides a connection between a word sounding like "broke" in English, and bracha in Hebrew.

Here's one more, although I'm not sure whether I believe it. There are those who think that the origin of the term "break a leg" (a way to wish luck to someone before a performance) is in Hebrew.

How so? There are a number of explanations out there - here's the one from World Wide Words:

Germans say Hals- und Beinbruch, “neck and leg break”, as ways of wishing someone good luck without any fear of supernatural retaliation. It is sometimes said that the German expression is actually a corruption of a Hebrew blessing hatzlakha u-brakha, “success and blessing”, which may have been borrowed via Yiddish. Whatever its source, the most plausible theory is that Hals- und Beinbruch was transferred into the American theatre (in which Yiddish- or German-speaking immigrant Jews were strongly represented) sometime after World War I.

Doesn't sound too likely to me, but I'll buy it before I stop eating gebrochts...

hamentaschen

The etymology of hamentaschen is fairly well known. They did not originally refer to Haman (and therefore the Hebrew אוזני המן oznei haman - came much later.) These pastries were originally called "mahn-taschen". Mohn means "poppy" in German, and tasch is a pocket. When you add the Hebrew definitive article ha, they become ha-mahn-taschen, which is easy to associate with Haman. Of course there are many "midrashim" (really Purim torah), that expound on the connection: that Haman had three-cornered ears like the pastry, or had a three cornered hat, or a new one for me, that it refers to המן תש - "Haman became weak."

But here at Balashon, we go deeper. What is the origin of tasch and mohn?

From here we see that tasch from comes from Middle High German tasche, and earlier from Old High German tasca. Tasca is related to the English word "task", and both are related to "tax". What's the connection between task, tax and pocket? The Online Etymology Dictionary explains as follows: "amount of work imposed by some authority," to "payment for that work," to "wages," to "pocket into which money is put," to "any pocket." (A connection between Haman and taxes can be seen in the more recent custom to boo at the reading of the word mas מס - tax in the Megila, the same way as Haman is booed.)

Mohn in German is related to the Dutch maan, and has a number of related words in Indo-European languages, including the Greek mekon.

schmooze and shul

I guess a better title would be "don't schmooze in shul".

As I've mentioned before, I don't know a lot about Yiddish. But many Yiddish words have entered Jewish English, or English in general. It's interesting to analyze their etymologies, since Yiddish derives from two separate languages families - Hebrew, which I speak in Israel, and German, which is related to my native tongue, English.

Let's look at two common Yiddish words.

Schmooze (or shmooze) - this one comes from Hebrew. The Hebrew word for rumors, שמועות shmu'ot, led to the Ashkenazi pronunciation schmues, which led to our schmooze - to chat.

Shul (or schul or schule) - as in synagogue, comes from the German word schuol, which is also the source of our English word school. According to this site, the association of synagogue and school goes back to Roman times - children were often taught in the same building as the synagogue.