At my son's birthday party last week, I noticed that he and his friends were playing the game Ga-ga . I used to love that game as a kid ...

Tonight my son and daughter had a little fight. She came to me saying that he called her " kookoo " קוקו (crazy) - he claimed he o...

Growing up in San Francisco, we used to have a joke about our neighbors to the south: "What's the difference between Los Angeles a...

What do angels and cabbages have in common? Well, they both share the Hebrew word kruv כרוב, but except for Jastrow - who provides the un...

In his book Yofi Shel Ivrit (chapter 31), Avshalom Kor points out a distinction I had never really paid attention to before: the difference...

Sometimes I find a such an obvious connection between a Hebrew word and a foreign one that I'm really surprised I didn't notice it e...

Many years ago, when I was first exposed to Israeli slang, I came up with the following joke: " How did Bilaam start the letter he gave...

Well.... Kri and Ktiv Game #4 finally has a winner ! Simon has done it again... I think this one should be much easier (but I haven't b...

Last week we had an example of a word that was originally written with a samech , but due to the similarity between that letter and a mem s...

In Hebrew, to say someone went bankrupt, we say that he pashat et haregel פשט את הרגל. This literally means "he extended his leg (or f...

I was going to write a post about the city of Gaza עזה, if it was related to the word עוז oz - strength, and the theory that the material ...

It's a good thing that I live in the age of computers. Had I tried writing this stuff in a time where I would need to write by hand - no...

Sometimes how you define a word actually "defines" you as well. For example, let's take the Hebrew words nesher נשר and ayi...

Last month, Treppenwitz , one of my daily reads and a fellow resident of Efrat, wrote a very funny post about how his wife Zahava thought ...

Before we get started with today's post, I'm including a built in kri-and-ktiv game - the answer will come at the end. (But I'm...

In our previous post, we discussed the word sudar , and how it was formed from the Greek sudarium , which became סודרין in Hebrew. This wor...

In Modern Hebrew we find two words with the same consonants, but different vowels: סוּדָר - sudar - "scarf, shawl" סְוֶדֶר - sv...

ADDeRabbi asked me (a while ago, I know, but better late than never): "What's the origin of the term ' d o ogri '?...

Time for a new game! (Since there hasn't been a successful guess, I'm adding another clue.) a) quiet thanks b) he encouraged his aun...

I live in a community that has an active local email list, and people are often looking for rides from one place to another. It always looks...