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.