Hooray for Yiddish! : a book about English

by Leo Rosten

Paper Book, 1982

Status

Available

Call number

437/.947

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

New York : Simon and Schuster, c1982.

Description

"A cheerful lexicon of Yiddish words which have become part of the English language, plus English words and phrases which have been trasformed into Yinglish; the whole garnished with stories, jokes, parables, reverent quotations from the Talmud and a glittering gallery of writers, rabbis, sages wits, with impulsive side trips into faith, folklore, genious and history of the Jews-- from their servitude in Babylon to their magnitude in Beverly Hills."

User reviews

LibraryThing member TurtleBoy

This book is a treasury of jokes, folk sayings, witticisms, criticisms, and general kibbitzment surrounding one of our world's most expressive languages and the literary love of Leo Rosten, Yiddish. While his etymologies are sometimes specious and his jokes are older than Methuselah, Rosten

delivers a strike with this sequel to his famous The joys of Yiddish. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the language, or merely in Jewish culture.

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LibraryThing member kencf0618

An essential reference for every language library. The jokes are funny, nu?

LibraryThing member Hamburgerclan

Well, I finally did it. After a couple of years of browsing the better books section at the Friends of the Library sale, I finally found a book for which I was willing to shell out the extra money. I had enjoyed The Joys of Yiddish so much that I found it worth $3 to purchase its sequel. Well,

actually, Hooray for Yiddish is only sort of a sequel. Like its predecessor, it contains many Yiddish words and phrases, each illustrated by a joke or two. (Which made Joys the first dictionary that's fun to read.) What makes Hooray different is that it focuses on the words or phrases that have entered into common American English usage. This leads to some pages that are entirely in English, though Mr. Rosten makes a good case for the entries' Yiddish roots. It's not as good as Joys, but it's still worth putting on my shelf.
--J.

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