Minor gripe about the English language, based on today's NYT puzzle

[rhu]

I'm going to start with a bunch of spoiler space content so that RSS-based readers (including the feed to my Facebook profile) don't pick up the spoilers contained herein. Blah blah blah blah blah.

OK, still here?

So I get to 40D, "Matchmaker for Tevye's daughters." And I think, "Hey, we just had this word yesterday; let me glance over at yesterday's answer to see if the transliteration that Will considers normative ends with an A or an E."

And of course it was wrong, because yesterday we were looking for "gossip", which apparently (per Merriam-Webster) entered English as YENTA, and today we were looking for the Sholom Aleichem character, whose name has entered the English corpus as YENTE.

Now the reason that the word yente -- excuse me, yenta -- came to mean "gossip" in Yiddish is because of the character in Sholom Aleichem's stories. It's as if we had developed the word Polianna to mean "an incurable optimist."

My fault for thinking of both clues as referring to the same Yiddish word, instead of realizing that the word crossed the Atlantic in two different boats. Or, more likely, in different sections of the same boat -- yenta in steerage with the Polish and Russian Jews and Yente in second-class with the German Jews and their books.

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Um, so a yenta is a gossip and a yente is matchmaker?

[ucaoimhu.livejournal.com]

And, according to Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison is a yentor.

[autotruezone.livejournal.com]

If the clue had been "Matchmaker for Tevya's daughters", then the answer would have been "YENTA" :-)

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

An interesting little nugget, to be sure, but I'm not quite sure why it constitutes a gripe. Surely you wouldn't want English to be consistent and devoid of historical oddities...?

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Because the post started as a gripe about the puzzle, and then as I wrote it I realized that it wasn't fair to blame the puzzle, so I changed the second half of the title without rethinking the first half.

Chastisement accepted.

[fauxklore]

I'd disagree that Yente entered English from German Jews and their books. Sholom Aleichem was Ukrainian, for one,and he made regular trips back and forth between America and Europe (living largely in Geneva). For another, he almost certainly used the name Yente for the character because he was familiar with Russian Jewish folklore and the character Yente Peshe, who gossips as she makes her rounds.

What I've always found interesting is that matchmakers were most often men in that time and place.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I overreached in trying to wrap it up with a catchy image. Thanks for calling me on it. (This post is not turning out to be a high point of my blog.)