מֻקְפָּץ Yesterday evening I had dinner with my friend Avi, who takes pride in his delicious, healthy cooking. He fried us up some schnitzel, but when I commented that he was frying it in olive oil instead of Canola, he corrected me, saying that was sautéeing, not frying. Sauté comes from French. The…
אַשְׁמָה, לְהַאֲשִׁים Note the similarity between the English word shame and the Hebrew word אָשֵׁם (ah-SHEM). The Hebrew word describes a male as guilty. A guilty female would be אֲשֵׁמָה (ah-sheh-MAH). Guilt, that nasty feeling that might nevertheless provoke us to do good, is אַשְׁמָה. One might say, יֵשׁ לִי רִגְשֵׁי אַשְׁמָה (yesh lee…
מָלוּחַ My סַבְתָּא (SAHV-tah) grandmother is a great cook. She learned how to prepare delicious dishes from her mother back in Hungary before the war. סבתא has Hungarian taste in food. So from time to time she asks me, אֲתָּה אוֹהֵב דָּג מָלוּחַ (ah-TAH oh-HEV dahg mah-LOO-ahkh) – Do you like salty fish?…
לְזַהוֹת Explosives were planted yesterday on a public phone opposite בִּנְיָנֵי הָאוּמָה (been-yah-NEH-ee hah-oo-MAH) – The Buildings of the Nation. Had a man not noticed the suspicious-looking phone and alerted a group of teenagers standing by it to move away, the tragic attack of pure terror could have been a lot more so….
לְצַיֵּץ My guess is that there’s an 90% chance you’ve heard of Twitter. If you haven’t, here’s the site itself, as well as what Amazon lists as one of the best books on the subject. When I first visited Twitter, it took me a while to see the connection between the name of…
שִׁשִּׁיָּה If you know some Hebrew, you certainly know the Hebrew word for six – שֵׁש (shesh) in the feminine and שִׁשָּׁה (shee-SHAH) in the masculine (learned in Level 1 of Ulpan La-Inyan). Yes, it’s counterintuitive – normally the “ah” ending comes with feminine words. Note how both שישה and שש sound somewhat like the…
לִשְׂמוֹחַ Today was Purim in Jerusalem, so I’m just getting around to the word of the day now. You’ve all got the benefit of reading the product of my imagination as I’m sobering up – almost there, but not quite. In English, emotional reactions are typically adjectives – such as angry and…
מְבַדֵּחַ There are a few words for entertaining in Hebrew. There’s מְבַדֵּר (meh-vah-DEHR), coming from the more common word, בִּדּוּר (bee-DOOR). There’s מַצְחִיק (mahts-KHEEK), meaning funny. There’s מְשַׁעְשֵׁע (meh-shah-ah-SHEH-ah), meaning amusing (I did an entry on משעשע this past January). Here’s a word that doesn’t get used as often as the others… except for Purim. On Israeli radio…
לְהַגְדִּיל Eliyahu, one the students in my Level 5 class at AACI Jerusalem was trying to say to enlarge something, but used the word for to raise instead. It’s an excellent error for a budding Hebrew speaker, as it presents the opportunity to distinguish between not only two different words, but two different word types….
לְהִתְחַפֵּשׂ Purim‘s coming up on Sunday in most of Israel and the world and on Monday in Jerusalem. Among other traditions kept, Jews throughout the world will be dressing up in costumes. A costume or disguise is a תַּחְפֹּשֶׂת (tahkh-POH-set). To dress up in a costume is לְהִתְחַפֵּש (leh-heet-khah-PES). For example, כָּל הַיְּלָדִים הִתְחַפְּשׂוּ לַמּוֹרִים שֶׁלָּהֵם…
הִזְדַּהוּת רִגְשִׁית This entry is for our students, Toshy and Lucas. As yours likely does as well, my heart goes out to the people of Japan. הזדהות Identity in Hebrew is זֵהוּת (zeh-HOOT). The root is ז.ה.ה (z.h.h), the concept of identity or identical. To identify with someone or something is לְהִזְדַּהוֹת (leh-heez-dah-HOHT). This is the…