Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.067 September 25, 1996 1) Pi pa po (Johannes Seppi) 2) Pi pa po (Michael Steinlauf) 3) Pi pa po (Berel Leiser) 4) "shm-" (arnold perlmutter) 5) Hebrew e-mail (Ahava Ermentrout) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 96 20:13 GMT+0100 From: jseppi@xpoint.at Subject: Pi pa po The Brockhaus "Deutsches Woerterbuch" has "pipapo" 'and so on' and "Pipapo" 'the (unnecessary) rest' like in 'marches, parades and Pipapo'. They also note that the derivation of the word is unknown. For me (an Austrian) it feels like a definite (north)German expression, and I can only remember reading it at the end of a list in the combination 'etcetera pipapo'. Johannes Seppi Vienna, Austria 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 12:21:04 -0500 (EST) From: yivo3@metgate.metro.org Subject: Pi, pa, po Considering how little response there's been on this business, I guess I should share some of my early memories, which I always thought were totally unique. My father, who worked a one-man business in the NY garment center in the 1950s and 60s, had the part-time help of a shipping clerk named Alexander Schindler. Alex, a short broad Jew with thick eyeglasses and an extraordinary full head of dark hair parted on the side like a schoolboy, worked vi a ferd at least 12 hours a day. Alex had a reputation for being intensely nuts as well as for giving ridiculously disproportionate amounts of his pay for tsedoke. Like most of the other adults I knew, he was a Holocaust survivor. Whenever as a kid I visited the grungy warehouse of the laundry supply business where he worked (my father had a desk in the corner), Alex made quite an impression, not the least of which was his incessant refrain, repeated hundreds of times a day with dread finality in his varshever loshn as he shlepped huge laundry bags over his shoulder: Pee-pah-poo! Asta la vista la furtse la granda! Michael Steinlauf 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 25 Sep 96 09:24:07 EDT From: leiser@pacevm.dac.pace.edu Subject: Pi, Pa, Po The origin of Pi, Pa, Po is so obvious that I'm surprised other Mendelniks haven't thought of it: It comes from Ping, Pang, and Pong, the three shmendriks in Turandot. Turandot was, of course, a Khazar queen before Puccini patschket around with the story, which was first written in Mame Loshn, and told about the conversion of that great kingdom to Yiddishkeit. The three riddles were easily solved by the hero, Kalaf (whose name was derived from the Hebrew word for "scroll"), a renowned Torah scholar and soyfer. You can read the whole story of how Kalaf converted Turandot and her whole kingdom in the Kuzari. Ping, Pang, and Pong were among the first to jump into the mikveh. A gut un gezunt yor, alemen. Berel Leiser 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 17:57:30 EST From: perlmutter@phyvax.ir.miami.edu Subject: "shm-" i found zellig bach's comment about the belittling quality of the prefix "shm-" (6.065) most amusing.it recalled to me the quite disparate use of prefix "s-" in so-called supersymmetric theories in particle physics. there, all particles,e.g.,electron, quark, neutrino, etc.,are purported to have a supersymmetric counterpart, much heavier than the ordinary one, and obeying an alternate kind of statistics (i.e., fermions become bosons and vice versa). these supersymmetric particles are then called selectron, squark, sneutrino, etc. their possible existence is taken quite seriously, and experimentalists have been searching for them, but thus far there is no evidence for them that i know of. of course, here the "s-" must clearly derive from "supersymmetric", although at first glance it does look like some kind of joke. i wonder if the use of "shm-" might have evolved from "shmendrik", or perhaps from one of a few other words of a derogatory nature. arnold perlmutter coral gables, florida 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 20:40:57 -0400 From: cermentrout@infoave.net Subject: Hebrew e-mail Do you know about this? I've only tried it a little bit, but it seems really nice, once you get it figured out. It should work decently with Yiddish, too. If you don't have Eudora you can get it free from the net. On the other hand, if you have used this already, what do you think? Taken from Brigada for 14 Sep 96: send and receive email in hebrew! -- chris istrati (capable moderator for brigada-peoples) sent along a tip this week that at , developers have pulled together "mikhtav," hebrew for the word "letter." the site apparently includes discussions about topics of israeli jewish interest in hebrew using hebrew letters, instead of latin transliteration. the site contains all of the software utilities that you will need to communicate on the list -- downloadable software for macintosh, pc or unix shell accounts. Ahava Ermentrout ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.067