Blessings, Curses, Hopes and Fears - Hardcover

Matisoff, James A.

 
9780804733939: Blessings, Curses, Hopes and Fears
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0804733937 ISBN 13: 9780804733939
Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2000

Synopsis

In this delightful book, the author enumerates and classifies the formulas Yiddish speakers use to express their emotions-from blessings and thanks to lamentations and curses. A rarity among scholarly books, it brings joy while it teaches; it makes us smile, sometimes roar with laughter, while it develops the most rigorous linguistic argumentation.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

In this delightful book, the author enumerates and classifies the formulas Yiddish speakers use to express their emotions. It is a rarity among scholarly books, for it brings joy while it teaches; it makes us smile, sometimes roar with laughter, while it develops the most rigorous linguistic argumentation. The author analyzes the many kinds of Yiddish "psycho-ostensives"--ranging from blessings and thanks to lamentations and curses. To a person who mentions something horrible you can say: Zalts dir in di oygn, fefer dir in noz! ("Salt into your eyes, and pepper into your nose!"). Or to a child you might tenderly murmur: A gezúnt dir in yeder éyverl! ("A health to all your little body-parts!"). The author illustrates how these formulas can be used to fulfill social conventions, to keep away evil, to show off--or even to deceive the listener.
Comments [1999]
"I have known and profited from this book for many years, and its interest for linguistics and Yiddish studies has grown steadily. The book will have three audiences: specialists in Yiddish; linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists who are interested in the emotional side of language; and general linguists familiar with Matisoff's outstanding contributions, both witty and insightful, in other linguistic fields."
--William Labov,
University of Pennsylvania
"Matisoff's book was pathbreaking, innovative, and crucially important when it was first published and remains so today. It is as relevant as it was then, if not more so. Matisoff is a consummate scholar and also an excellent writer: clear and weighty but also whimsical and witty." --Deborah Tannen,
Georgetown University

From the Inside Flap

In this delightful book, the author enumerates and classifies the formulas Yiddish speakers use to express their emotions. It is a rarity among scholarly books, for it brings joy while it teaches; it makes us smile, sometimes roar with laughter, while it develops the most rigorous linguistic argumentation. The author analyzes the many kinds of Yiddish "psycho-ostensives"--ranging from blessings and thanks to lamentations and curses. To a person who mentions something horrible you can say: Zalts dir in di oygn, fefer dir in noz! ("Salt into your eyes, and pepper into your nose!"). Or to a child you might tenderly murmur: A gezunt dir in yeder eyverl! ("A health to all your little body-parts!"). The author illustrates how these formulas can be used to fulfill social conventions, to keep away evil, to show off--or even to deceive the listener.
Comments [1999]
"I have known and profited from this book for many years, and its interest for linguistics and Yiddish studies has grown steadily. The book will have three audiences: specialists in Yiddish; linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists who are interested in the emotional side of language; and general linguists familiar with Matisoff's outstanding contributions, both witty and insightful, in other linguistic fields."
--William Labov,
University of Pennsylvania
"Matisoff's book was pathbreaking, innovative, and crucially important when it was first published and remains so today. It is as relevant as it was then, if not more so. Matisoff is a consummate scholar and also an excellent writer: clear and weighty but also whimsical and witty." --Deborah Tannen,
Georgetown University

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

BLESSINGS, CURSES, HOPES, AND FEARS

PSYCHO-OSTENSIVE EXPRESSIONS IN YIDDISH

By JAMES A. MATISOFF

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2000 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3393-9

Contents

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION..............................................xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................xxi
FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION..............................................xxiii
ABBREVIATIONS..............................................................xxix
NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION OF YIDDISH WORDS.....................................xxxi
1 INTRODUCTION.............................................................1
2 SEMANTIC SUBTYPES OF PSYCHO-OSTENSIVE EXPRESSIONS........................9
3 BONO-RECOGNITION: THANKS AND CONGRATULATIONS.............................11
4 MALO-RECOGNITION: LAMENTATION AND SYMPATHY...............................17
5 PETITIVE ATTITUDES.......................................................23
6 BONO-PETITION............................................................29
7 MALO-FUGITION: DELIVER US FROM EVIL!.....................................43
8 PSYCHO-OSTENSIVES RELATING TO THE DEAD...................................65
9 ALLO-MALO-PETITION: CURSES!..............................................71
10 SWEARING OATHS..........................................................89
11 CONCLUSION AND COMMENCEMENT.............................................97
12 'EPES AN ÉPILOG': THE RELEVANCE OF YIDDISH PSYCHO-OSTENSIVES TO RECENT 
AND FUTURE WORK IN LINGUISTICS AND OTHER FIELDS............................		107
NOTES......................................................................117
BIBLIOGRAPHY TO THE FIRST EDITION..........................................149
ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY (SECOND EDITION)...................................155

<br><h2>CHAPTER 1</h2><p><b>INTRODUCTION</b></p><br><p>To say that a language is "an infinite set of well-formed sentences" is alittle like saying that a human being consists of water, carbon, salt, andtrace elements. That is, there are certain restricted contexts in whichsuch statements make sense, even though there are many other intellectualpoints of view from which they are irrelevant and misleading. Whenwe are engrossed in our formalistic charts and diagrams, writing ourrules and playing with our arrows and brackets, it is easy to forget thatwe are approaching that magnificent infinite object, Language, in muchthe same way as the blind men in the fable approached the elephant.</p><p>In particular, most linguists have been operating on the heuristic assumptionthat the speakers of a language are some kind of beautifullyprogrammed automata, sentence-generating machines capable of producinga limitless number of grammatical utterances that conform in allrespects to a fixed set of rules—the grammar of one's native language—thathas been internalized in early childhood. This point of view, aseveryone knows, has opened up some brilliantly successful lines of investigation.But now it is time to move on from the elephant's cerebralcortex to his primitive brain stem, his heart, his gonads, or wherever elsethe seat of his emotions may be located.</p><p>The work of William Labov and his students has undercut the overlyrigid Chomskyan dichotomy between "competence" and "performance"to the point where it is no longer clear in what sense we can speak ofa "rule of grammar" at all. Variability is now understood by many tobe as basic to linguistic structure as the countertendency toward orderand organization. We can easily construct "an infinite set of sentences"in any language as to the grammaticality of which native speakers willviolently disagree, each citing his own sacred intuitions as evidence oneway or the other. It is precisely this variability that lies at the heart oflinguistic creativity.</p><p>Language is the frail bridge that we fling across the chasm of the inexpressibleand the incommunicable.</p><p>Anyone who has ever tried to get any thoughts down on paper knowshow hard it is to "say what you mean." How much more difficult this isunder the time pressure of ordinary rapid conversation! When we write,we have the leisure to go back and cross things out, add a word hereor permute some words there, recast a sentence completely if we havegotten ourselves into a desperate syntactic bind. When we speak, ourinterlocutors will lose patience with us if we say, "Just a minute—I usedthe perfect tense in that last sentence, but the action referred to reallydidn't have enough present relevance for that, so I retract it and willuse the simple past instead. Also, I'd like to put that adverb at the endof the sentence instead of at the beginning—I don't know why, it justsounds better." At this point our listener would be likely to say, "Go tothe devil with your adverbs and your present relevance!" or,if he is a Yiddishspeaker, <i>Gey tsum tayvl mit dayne adverbn un ítstike sháyekhdikkayttsuzamen!</i></p><p>Under the pressure to communicate rapidly, the edges of the grammarare constantly being bent and deformed, expanded and retracted.My daughter's report card this morning carried the teacher's scrawledcomment, <i>She shuns away from the math area.</i> How can we be so arrogantas to stigmatize this as a "performance error"? We might succeedin demonstrating that <i>shuns away from</i> derives analogically from <i>shiesaway from</i> in some historical sense. But it is not a "mistake," for God'ssake. It's a rather nice new creation, in fact, and had doubtless alreadyoccurred independently in the speech of millions of people of all socialclasses and degrees of linguistic virtuosity. It already sounds grammaticalto me, better and better each time I say it over to myself. The newgrammar is constantly being created on top of the willing and yieldingruins of the old. To worry about where "one" grammar ends and the"next" grammar begins is a totally meaningless and futile pursuit. Innovationsin language are welcomed at least as much as they are resisted.</p><p>Everybody knows (but linguists have usually forgotten) that the realcommunication that goes on during interpersonal exchanges often hasvery little to do with the actual words that are spoken. We can be talkingabout the damn cat when all we want to do is go to bed with each other.We can be trading polite commiserations about the weather even as weare thinking how we hate each other, and how gladly we would bathein the other's blood. From early childhood on, we learn to look for "the<i>real</i&ggt; meaning behind the words." That is, we look for paralinguistic cuesto the speaker's real psychic states or attitudes, which his words maybe belying. When a parent halfheartedly sayssss," That's wonderful, dear,"in response to something the child is showing off to him, the child willunderstand this as meaning "Big deal! Go away, kid, you bother me."When the parent is screaming at the child in sincere fury, "How manytimes did I tell you not to do that?" the child knows that it will go farbetter for him if he says nothing and looks contrite than if he treats theemotional outburst as a real question and answers, "Well, my best guessis fifteen or sixteen times." We do not like people who give us a detailedcatalogue of their ailments in response to "How are you?" All that wewant from them is a formula, like "Fine, thank you" or "Couldn't bebetter," or, if they are Yiddish speakers, <i>Freg nit</i> ("Don't ask!").</p><p>The point is, millions of sentences are "generated" every day that havea surface structure <i>and</i> a deep structure (in the conventional sense) thatare totally unrelated to what is really going on in the speaker's (andthe listener's) mind. Put another way, any utterance in a language maybe associated with an indefinite number of psychic states, and many ofthese cannot possibly be deduced from the words themselves. If linguistsare serious about wanting to integrate meaning into a comprehensivetheory of language, these facts must eventually be faced.</p><p>Actually, there are signs of movement in such a direction. Recentwork on the "presuppositions" underlying utterances, although stilllargely tied to the generative umbilicus, may yet lead to the modificationof some cherished formalistic attitudes. Consider the sentence, "He sayshe will seek legislation distinguishing marijuana from the more dangerousaddictive drugs." This may be understood in at least four ways.Either he believes (i.e., "has a presupposition that") marijuana is addictivebut not so dangerous as, say, heroin, or he believes that marijuanais neither very dangerous nor addictive. On the other hand, he may bequite neutral on the question of marijuana's danger or addictivity andmay only be seeking legislation that will enshrine the fact that marijuanais not the same as other drugs. In this (less likely) interpretation, thetwo alternative presuppositions are inside the head of the speaker whois reporting the legislator's plans, not inside the legislator himself.</p><p>Even closer to the concerns of the present book is the exciting workbeing done by Wallace L. Chafe, who is beginning to explore directlythe linguistic repercussions of the psychic attitudes (or "states of consciousness")of the speaker and hearer.</p><p>Yiddish has the deserved reputation of being a highly expressive language.This "funkiness" has been sentimentalized over with insistentvulgarity by some popular writers. At the other extreme we find thesomewhat solemn academic approach of the professional Yiddishist, forwhom the Yiddish language is primarily the vehicle for high-mindedscholarly endeavor, a precious jewel to be preserved intact for an everdwindling cultural elite. Perhaps the time has come to stop "shunningaway" from the earthier side of Yiddish, in the interests of determiningjust what it is that gives the language its considerable emotive power.</p><p>We shall find that Yiddish has, among its arsenal of expressive devices,certain well-defined classes of ready-made phrases or formulas that aretypically inserted parenthetically into larger sentences and whose onlyfunction is to give vent to the speaker's emotional attitude toward whathe is talking about. Each of these <i>psycho-ostensive expressions</i> is intendedby the speaker to be accepted as the direct linguistic manifestation ofhis psychic state of the moment. The speaker wishes to share his emotionexplicitly with his listener, to display them overtly so as to narrowdown the possible range of underlying attitudes that the listener mightotherwise guess to be lurking behind his words. When somebody says,</p><p>(i) <i>Mayn zun, zol er zayn gezúnt un shtark, vet mir dos shiknahér</i> ("My son, <i>may he be healthy and strong</i>, will send ithere to me"),</p><br><p>he means the listener to make no mistake that he loves his son and wisheshim well. When he says,</p><p>(ii) <i>Góverner Reygn, zol er óysgemekt vern, git mayn zun demprofesor, a gezúnt tsu im, keyn hesofe nit hayyor</i> ("GovernorReagan, <i>may he be erased</i>, isn't giving any raise this year tomy son the professor, <i>a health to him</i>"),</p><br><p>he leaves no doubt about his psychic attitudes toward the various partiesto the action.</p><p>This is not to say that these psycho-ostensive expressions may not beused mendaciously. Nothing is stopping you from saying,</p><p>(iii) <i>Mayn feter Khaim-Yankl, olevasholem, flegt dos alemól zogn</i>("My Uncle Chaim-Yankl, <i>upon him peace</i>, always used tosay that"),</p><br><p>when what you really mean is "My uncle, the old cretin, used to giveme that stuff all the time." Often it is not so much that the speaker isusing an emotive formula that actually belies his true feelings, as thatthe formula has become a surrogate for the true feeling, an almost automaticlinguistic feature that constant usage has rendered as predictableand redundant as the concord in number between subject and verb. Thespeaker may have no particular feelings one way or the other about oldUncle Chaim-Yankl but says <i>olevasholem</i> by pure reflex action. Nevertheless,psycho-ostensives <i>are</i> often used in Yiddish with utter sincerityand are very much a living, breathing part of the language.</p><p>The formation of these emotive expressions is a productive processamong fully fluent Yiddish speakers, so that it is impossible to give anythingapproaching an exhaustive list of them. Virtuosity in concoctingnew linguistic variations on the old emotive themes is highly prized. Ittakes little imagination to say <i>Tsu gezúnt</i> ("Gesundheit!") when somebodysneezes. This is indeed a "ready-made phrase or formula," about asoriginal as the "Hello" with which one answers the telephone. But thinkof the genius of the first person who ever greeted his startled friend'ssneeze with:</p><p>(iv) <i>Tsu gezúnt, tsu lebn, tsu langeyor, zolst vaksn un bliyen inder leng un in der breyt vi a Purim-koyletsh!</i> ("To yourhealth, and life, and longevity, and may you grow andbloom in your length and in your width like a Purim-loaf!")</p><br><p>Jews have always admired articulate, flavorful speech. The Yiddish languageprovides conventionalized, well-established discourse-slots forthe insertion of psycho-ostensive expressions, but there is considerablelatitude for individual flights of fancy in filling the slots.</p><p>It is, of course, impossible to predict a priori which new variationswill catch on and become adopted by so many speakers that they becomepart of the language" in the sense of belonging to the competence ofthe typical native speaker." Even more thankless a task would be to tryto formulate rigorous constraints" on the formation of new psycho-ostensives, insuch a way that one could make the negative predictionthat a given phrase would never become a standard formula. True, weshall see, for example, that in psycho-ostensive curses one has greaterfreedom in specifying a particular body part for the evil to strike thanone does in similarly phrased benedictions (below, 9.3). It sounds betterin the abstract to say,</p><p>(v) <i>mayn shver, a krenk zol im aráyn in di yasles ...</i> ("myfather-in-law, may a disease enter his gums ..."),</p><br><p>than it does to say,</p><p>(vi) <i>mayn tokhter, a gezúnt zol ir aráyn in di yasles ...</i> ("mydaughter, may health enter her gums ...").</p><br><p>Yet if one's daughter had been suffering from gingivitis, the latter expressionwould be so appropriate that it would pass unnoticed.</p><p>For Jews with limited access to the mainstream of Western culturein the <i>shtetlekh</i> of Eastern Europe, the outside Gentile world was oftenrather hostile, cold, and intimidating. The inner Jewish world, in compensation, despiteits material poverty and frequent pettiness, was atleast full of overt demonstrations of feeling: heartfelt loves and hatreds,fears and hopes received constant outward expression in the languageof the people. It is no accident that Yiddish is sentimentally referred toas <i>mame-loshn</i> ("mother language").</p><p>Yiddish psycho-ostensives, despite their richness and variety, all seemto fall into a few large psychosemantic categories, all having to do basicallywith attitudes toward <i>good</i> and <i>evil</i>. These include expressionswhere the speaker is wishing for good things (life, health, prosperity)for himself or his family, or altruistically for people in the outgroup; expressionsof gratitude for good things received or lamentations for one'stroubles; apotropaic locutions used to ward off evil, including expressionsthat are meant to appease the dead; formulas whereby one callsdown evil (death, disease, misfortune) on others; and oaths one uses toswear to the truth, sometimes taking the form of wishing evil to oneselfin order to convince others of one's veracity.</p><h2>CHAPTER 2</h2><p><b>SEMANTIC SUBTYPES OFPSYCHO-OSTENSIVE EXPRESSIONS</b></p><br><p>We shall deal with six basic subtypes of psycho-ostensives. Perhaps thatis all there are. All Yiddish psycho-ostensives seem to involve the speaker'sattitude toward the good things and the bad things of life. Sometimesthis is a passive attitude of acceptance or recognition that goodor evil has befallen. At least as often, the speaker assumes a more activepsychic stance, expressing his desire, wish, seeking for the good; or conversely, hisabhorrence, fear, shunning of the evil; or, perversely, his wishthat evil may strike his fellow man or himself. Perhaps a little homemadenomenclature is in order here, <i>pace</i> any professional psychologistsin the audience. (<i>Pace</i> is actually a <i>palliative blessing</i>: see pp. 38–39.) Therelatively passive attitude of acceptance of good or evil we call <i>recognitive</i>;the (more active) attitude of seeking or desiring we call <i>petitive</i>; andthe (more active) attitude of shunning or fearing we call <i>fugitive</i>. Addto these the Greek roots for self" and other" (<i>auto-</i> and <i>allo-</i>) and theLatin roots for "good" and "evil" (<i>bono-</i> and <i>malo-</i>), and we have all weneed for the moment. Thus, for example, <i>auto-malo-recognitive</i> meansrecognizing that evil has come to oneself"; <i>allo-bono-petitive</i> meanswishing for good to come to others," and so forth.</p><p>These categories, like all others in linguistics, are not mutually exclusiveand shade into one another, but they will do as a basis for discussion.As we look at the data, we shall see what syntactic and psychosemanticgeneralizations can be made, but we will not, God forbid, distort thedata to conform to our theoretical preconceptions.</p><h2>CHAPTER 3</h2><p><b>BONO-RECOGNITION:THANKS AND CONGRATULATIONS</b></p><br><p>Let us start on a positive note. Sometimes things do go well in this world,and the Yiddish speaker feels obliged to acknowledge his indebtedness toGod, from whom all blessings flow, whenever he mentions his own goodfortune. One of the most common of these auto-bono-recognitive expressionsis <i>borkhashém</i> (< Heb. <i>barukh ha-shem</i> "blessed be the Name[of God]"):</p><p>(1) <i>Ikh bin, borkhashém, gezúnt, un di gesheftn geyen gut.</i>("I am, bless God, healthy, and business is good." <i>RP</i>,p. 44.)</p><p>(2) <i>Es geyt, borkhashém, gants gut, un mit der vayb mayner lebikh gorfayn.</i> ("Things are going, bless God, very well, andI'm getting along fine with my wife." <i>RP</i>, p. 13)</p><p>(3) <i>Un ikh hob, borkhashém, gehát a sheyn bisl tekhter, hot dosgedoyert un gedojyert.</i> ("And I had, bless God,quite a fewdaughters, so it [marrying them off] took a long, longtime." <i>RP</i>, p. 23)

(Continues...)
Excerpted from BLESSINGS, CURSES, HOPES, AND FEARS by JAMES A. MATISOFF. Copyright © 2000 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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Publisher
Stanford University Press
Publication date
2000
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0804733937
ISBN 13 
9780804733939
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
200

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