When Sarah Silverman used the word “meshugaas” in her speech at the Oscars Feb. 28, I knew what it meant. But I’m a Jewish woman who was raised hearing Yiddish words and phrases scattered throughout conversation, so I thought it was great when I saw Dictionary.com kindly tweet out a link to their definition of the word for everyone following along on Twitter.
I was curious exactly how they defined it, so I clicked on the link. Then I wished I hadn’t.
Listed in italics above the definition, next to “noun,” was the word, “slang.”
That couldn’t be right. “Meshugaas” is not slang, it’s just Yiddish.
I gave them the benefit of the doubt and searched for a few other words borrowed from another language. Smorgasbord: noun. Aloha: noun, interjection. A la mode: adjective. Not a “slang” to be found. It was the same on the Oxford English Dictionary website.
My cultural heritage is no less important than French-Americans and Hawaiian-Americans. Yet most of the Yiddish words I searched were tagged with “slang,” “colloquial,” or both.
Interestingly, the words that weren’t marked as slang were the most common ones, or really the most assimilated ones: kosher, schmutz, tchotchke.
It seems like Yiddish is considered slang when it’s mostly members of the Jewish community who use it, and full words when everyone else does. But that can’t be. The number of people who use it, and their religious or cultural background, shouldn’t influence how a word is defined. That’s not how slang works.
Slang is defined as “language of a highly colloquial type, considered as below the level of standard educated speech,” but words borrowed from other languages, Yiddish included, don’t fit this definition. There’s nothing wrong with slang, but using it to inappropriately define words of a marginalized community as part of a less-educated language is discriminatory. In this case, it is anti-Semitic.
And if you want to argue that Jewish Americans are no longer marginalized, I’d like to point you to the most recent FBI statistics that show that the majority of religious hate crimes in the United States are perpetrated against Jewish people, and also to the Elon academic calendar, which makes Jewish students fill out applications to miss class on Yom Kippur (the holiest day of the Jewish calendar), but gives students an extra day off the Monday after Easter.
Yiddish is a language spoken by many Jews of Central- and Eastern-European descent. Jewish people living in this area, like many Jewish people around the world, were not fully accepted into the communities and countries they lived in.
In Germany, Jewish people combined the Hebrew they knew with the surrounding German and a few other eastern European languages. This led to the creation of Yiddish, a unique language which spread to other parts of Europe. This process created a variety of Jewish languages in other regions such as Ladino, a mix of Hebrew and Spanish, with influences from Arabic and other languages.
To call words we use in English but borrowed from Yiddish “slang” just because they were borrowed from Yiddish, while not holding borrowed words from other languages to the same rule, perpetuates bias against Jewish people. It is an attitude that reveals that as a nation, we still hold mistaken ideas about which languages and cultures are more desirable and appropriate than others.
That’s not an attitude I want perpetuated, and I hope you agree.