HELPING JEWISH FAMILIES GROW'

More Inside:

From The Editor:

Small Bites:
Community-wide thank yous.

A few special words.

Listen Up:

Eight great books for the eight great nights of Chanukah.

My Word!

Bagel, of course
but sapphire?
e Jewish connection to many everycay wore

B

Elizabeth Applebaum

1
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th i*g h any ,"natural:pdrenting''magazine
and, in between bites oflofu.and'quinoa, you'll
likely catch sight of an ad for a wonderful new
(natural, naturally) diaper called Tushies.
The company's owners aren't Jewish, but they knew a
good name when they heard it.
In fact, tush comes from a Yiddish word, tuchis, which
comes from the Hebrew tachat, which means bottom.
And it's just one of the many "English" words that has
roots in Yiddish or Hebrew. Here are a few more we bet
you didn't know:
''-'.;':.. Former-nobody-turned-exceptionally-wealthy-actor
Bruce Willis just starred in the film Armageddon. The
word is actually Hebrew, from har (mountain) and
Megiddo, the place where tradition says all nations will
meet for a final battle. If you want, you can really visit
Mt. Megiddo, which is in the northern Galilee in Israel.
In a great scene from his film The_Jerk, actor Steve
Martin decides he's going to celebrate. Dining at an
upper-crust eatery, he tells the waiter to "bring me a
NEW bottle of wine! Enough with that old stuff!"
Whether it's old or new, it's all Hebrew. "Wine" comes
from the Hebrew ya'yin.
_____ _
' 4--;j
. Many people imagine paradise as a gentle setting,
perhaps some beach where it's always 77 degrees and
never rains and flowers are blooming everywhere and
no radio stations play Barry Manilow songs, even the
easy-listening ones. The word "paradise" has its roots in
the Persian word for "orchard," though this evolved into
a Hebrew term (from which the English is taken) that
means heaven.

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AppleTree Editor

Love may be the international language, but the Eng-
lish word and the Hebrew ahava (also a line of skin-care
products) don't have a great deal in common. So per-
haps it's actually shopping that's the international lan-
guage, because everyone in the world uses the word
sack, which comes from Hebrew.
tt ;
': .,0 Are her eyes the blue, blue, blue of the most beauti-
ful ocean? Then give her a sapphire, the blue gemstone
that takes its name from the Hebrew.
46 4,, If you really want to remember to do something, psy-
chologists say, the best thing to do is jot it down. Now
does that word remind you of a Hebrew letter, perhaps?
In fact, it started with the Romans, who called the
Hebrew letter yud a "jot," because of its similarity to their
letter iota.
In some old movies you can still hear gangster-
wanna-bes refer to a five-dollar bill as a "fin." This comes
from Yiddish, where the word five is finif.
Whether it's A,B,C or aleph, bet, vet, "alphabet" is
credited with being Greek, but its real origins are the first
two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
r When Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney sang
about "Ebony and Ivory," did they know they were using a
Hebrew word? "Ebony" comes from the Hebrew even, or
stone. (Ebony today refers to a deep-black wood, which in
ancient times was more popular because it was so hard.)
If you've found a glitch in your computer program, you
won't be any too happy. But take comfort in the fact that
the word comes from the Yiddish, which evolved from the
German, which means "slip," and we're not talking about
the kind you might see in a mail-order catalogue. ❑