Category Archives: Hebrew
What they didn’t teach you in Hebrew School
If you are Jewish, you’ll understand this post. I don’t know who the author is but my nice Jewish mother sent it to me.
1. The High Holidays have absolutely nothing to do with marijuana.
2. Where there’s smoke, there may be salmon.
3. No meal is complete without leftovers.
4. According to Jewish dietary law, pork and shellfish may be eaten only in Chinese restaurants.
5. A shmata is a dress that your husband’s ex is wearing.
6. You need ten men for a minyan, but only four in polyester pants and white shoes for pinochle.
7. One mitzvah can change the world; two will just make you tired.
8. After the destruction of the Second temple , God created Nordstrom’s.
9. Anything worth saying is worth repeating a thousand times.
10. Never take a front row seat at a Bris.
11. Next year in Jerusalem . The year after that, how about a nice cruise?
12. Never leave a restaurant empty handed.
13. Spring ahead; fall back – winters in Boca.
14. WASPs leave and never say good-bye; Jews say good-bye and never leave.
15. Always whisper the names of diseases.
16. If it tastes good, it’s probably not kosher.
17. The important Jewish holidays are the ones on which alternate side of the street parking is suspended
18. Without Jewish mothers, who would need therapy?
19. If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it. But if you can afford it, make sure to tell everybody what you paid.
20. Laugh now, but one day you’ll be driving a Lexus and eating dinner at 4:00 PM in Florida .
Backformation in the vomitorium
I used to think a vomitorium was the place where self-indulgent romans would go to purge their over-stuffied bellies so they could have another round of over-eating. In a grammar and vocabulary dialog with a left-coast colleague of mine, I said the following as we discussed backformation:
In writing about backformation, I just found another horrendous one [backformation]. I just used this sentence:
“Edit” was backformed from “editor.”
I guess I could have written this:
“Edit” was backformated from “editor.”
Where, pray tell, is the vomitorium?
After the conversation, I recalled that in the movie Hanna (which I totally loved), the character of Sophie was fond of the word “vomitorium.” I wanted to find the exact line from the movie because I thought it was so amusing. As I looked for it, I discovered two entries for the Valley of Wrongness. The first entry goes to me for not knowing the correct definition of vomitorium and using that incorrect definition since I first saw I Claudius as a young teen. I thought it was a socially acceptable place to practice bulemia. The good folks at Dictionary.com say otherwise:
Main Entry: vomitorium
Part of Speech: n
Definition: in a theater or stadium, esp. ancient, a passageway leading to and from the seating
Etymology: Latin vomitorius, alluding to the path’s discharging of the spectators
That makes perfectly good sense. Then, they put the nail in the coffin of my Wrongness when they stated:
Word Origin & History
vomitorium
1754, “passage or opening in an ancient amphitheater, leading to or from the seats,” from L. (Macrobius, Sat. , VI.iv); see vomit. Erroneous meaning “place where ancient Romans (allegedly) deliberately vomited during feasts” is attested from 1923.
The second entry in the Valley of Wrongness goes to the dozens of sites that stated “vomitorium” was nothing more than teenage jargon. I’m only slightly better than them. I knew it was a real word. I just didn’t know what it meant.
Mea culpa.
References
vomitorium. (n.d.). Dictionary.com’s 21st Century Lexicon. Retrieved July 13, 2011, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vomitorium
vomitorium. (n.d.). Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved July 13, 2011, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vomitorium
