Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Getting All Haimish with Hillary

Haimish is said to mean 'homey and cozy' but to me it sounds like it's an itchy blanket or some type of mild affliction which prevents me from coming over to eat traditional Yiddish food.

I'm feeling a bit haimish this evening (cough, cough).

The word came to English from Yiddish people speaking High German and it arrived in the 1920s.  This makes perfect sense when we recall how haimish the Roaring Twenties were said to have been.


I'm not sure but I think 'kibble' comes from Yiddish as well but the dictionary only shows it going back to German.  The definition I know is for 'stuff which accumulates in corners' and it's not necessarily dirt but stuff.  It's the way a desk drawer will in time come to be possessed of a hundred pens in various states of order.  That's kibble and the dictionary didn't show that definition.

Haimish doesn't add too much to my life but kibble applies to everyone because we all have kibble somewhere.  It's all the stuff for which you don't have a strong reason to keep it but you can't bring yourself to throw it away.

Ref:  maybe a movie called "Kotch" or something like that but I didn't see it.  There seems to be a vague connection between that and kibble.

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