Ben Yagoda discusses a niche usage that produces hilarity among a restricted group of English-speakers:
In the language wars, I am pretty firmly a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist) but even descriptivists have pet peeves, and one of mine is basketball announcers who refer to “made three-pointers,” “made baskets,” and “made field goals.” My problem here is redundancy—three-pointers, baskets, and field goals have by definition been made. But a separate issue is I find those phrases funny. Along with referring to a basket as a “make.”
To give you a sense of why, I quote from a message sent in 2017 to the language columnist of the Jewish magazine Tikvah, who has the pen name Philologus. The correspondent, an academic dean at MIT, wrote:
Last year, I found myself in a meeting at which the head of the entrepreneurship center was describing a new course he was excited about. Related to what has lately been described as the “Maker Movement,” it was to be a joint project of the Management and Mechanical Engineering departments that was supposed to get engineers and managers more involved in manufacturing by closing the gap between designs and products.
After stating this in his introductory remarks, the proposed giver of the course then announced its name: “Intro to Making.”
This cracked the dean up. However, he reported, “when I looked around the room, I saw that no one was smiling but me.”
Here is my litmus test. You will find “Intro to Making” and “made baskets” funny if you are a (say) 50-plus-year-old person from an Ashkenazi Jewish background and/or the New York City metropolitan area; and/or you write movies or TV shows (rubbing shoulders with many a Jew); and/or you are an avid reader of the books of Judy Blume.
Such people, you see, understand “make” as a word used to and by children (and in reference to pets) meaning “defecate.” Use it in a sentence? Sure: “I have to make,” “She is making,” “Did Fido make?” […]
It may seem that I am harping on Jewishness but it is key. Specifically, the usage comes from the Yiddish word makhn, meaning “to make.” Philologos writes in Tikvah that the defecate meaning isn’t given in most Yiddish dictionaries, but
it is listed as a toilet term in Nahum Stutchkoff’s compendious thesaurus Der Oytser fun der Yiddisher Shprakh. When I asked a friend who is a native speaker of Yiddish to confirm this, she wrote back: “Yes, we did say makhn in our very refined family. As far as I know, the verb never took a direct object. It referred only to defecation, not urination.”
And this in turn derives from the German word for make. I asked my friend and neighbor Hansjakob Werlen, a professor of Germanic studies at Swarthmore College about this, and he replied, “The term machen when on the toilet, especially kids, does indeed indicate a successful completion of Nr 2.”
This usage somehow managed to elude me, despite my long residence in NYC; is it familiar to you?
First I heard the usage was an episode of The Rockford Files where Jim’s friend the reformed prostitute Rita Capkovic is trying to seem respectable at a dinner but refers to a pet of hers who “made and he made and he made.”
I don’t think I’ve heard of Ben Yagoda in quite a while, but he was a contributor for some things I read?
These elderly Ashkenazic-adjacent folks must get a lot of hilarity over the practice in Scotland 500 or so years ago of using “maker” (spelled variously, of course) as the high-falutin’ synonym for “poet.”
(Scotland apparently now has its own not-quite-sovereign poet laureate with the title of the Scots Makar. Sez wiki about a decade ago “it was suggested that the role might now only be referred to as the National Poet for Scotland, because of concerns that the word makar had to be explained outside of Scotland” but this negative attitude was rejected.)
I very briefly did some substitute teaching on the West Side of Chicago decades ago, in the primary grades. Some students would occasionally tell me “I gotta use”, which I quickly realized was a contraction for using the bathroom or restroom, presumably because at some point someone had decided it was a taboo word. I didn’t learn that from the kid who initially said this. I remember he was too embarrassed to spell things out for me. But presumably one of his more forward classmates filled me in.
I don’t recall ever hearing the usage since. I don’t know whether it was a strictly childhood usage, one that was fairly narrowly geographically circumscribed, maybe one that was drummed out of kids by successive teachers who responded, “sure, you can go to the bathroom.” I’ve done other work on the West Side and with West Siders, but perhaps not in a setting where this would be said.
It’s not precisely analogous since the implied but never spoken object was the room of shame rather than the shameful output, but pretty similar to the “make” usage described here nonetheless.
I’ve heard of “make water” as a euphemism for urination, but only in that compound.
Our town public middle school has an extracurricular group called the MakerSpace Club, which I think involves vaguely nerdy adolescents doing stuff with 3D printers although my 6th grader seems too focused on Minecraft to want to generate anything concrete/tangible right now? I assume the name seems straightforward and non-giggle-inducing to the kids.
Charlie Gordon uses it regularly in the early parts of Flowers for Algernon. Louis Tully (also a somewhat childlike character) uses it in Ghostbusters II during the trial scene.
Charlie Gordon uses it regularly in the early parts of Flowers for Algernon.
I certainly read that as a youngster; I wonder if I had any idea what it meant? (We said “go,” which I think is more or less general American.)
My problem here is redundancy—I presume the contrast is between goals made and goals missed? Reinforcement of the default may be redundant but is not superfluous, and “made” is a lot more succinct than “attempted successfully”.
In UK soccer, “making” a goal is not scoring but rather providing an “assist” (an Americanism embraced in the last 20 years).
It has eluded me in German – but everything is different as soon as you mention a direction. There’s a lovely little book for little children titled Wer hat mir auf den Kopf gemacht? – a mole exiting his burrow finds a turd covering his head and goes forth to find the culprit, edifying us with some comparative zoology.
Exists in German as “I gotta” – ich muss mal.
(All of this is regional, but you know I was going to say that. Both are widespread enough to appear in print unexplained.)
Reinforcement of the default may be redundant but is not superfluous, and “made” is a lot more succinct than “attempted successfully”.
Yes, I found that an odd peeve.
In UK soccer, “making” a goal is not scoring but rather providing an “assist”
That would definitely confuse me!
I don’t listen to a lot of basketball play-by-play broadcasting but the examples given certainly strike me as unhelpfully redundant. I guess I would want to see a transcript to get a better sense of whether there may be a functional justification where the explicit emphasis prevents a risk of the listener blundering into a misunderstanding, but I can’t immediately guess what that would be. Free throws by contrast are the basketball thing where if you just said a number I could see some ambiguity as to whether it was the attempts number or the successes number, if different – probably the soccer analogy is that “penalty kick” may plausibly refer to the attempt and you may need to specify further whether any particular such kick resulted in a goal.
I only know it as “in die Hose machen”.
Norw. gjøre i buksa, with gjøre “do”. My mother was fond of what was presumably an old witticism: Trond gjør mye rart. Noen ganger gjør han i buksa. “Trond [or whoever] does the strangest things. Sometimes he does in his pants.”
My problem here is redundancy—I presume the contrast is between goals made and goals missed? Reinforcement of the default may be redundant but is not superfluous, and “made” is a lot more succinct than “attempted successfully”.
Not missed typically, but contrasted specifically with attempted. I’m a basketball obsessive and that construction has never struck me as redundant. James Harden could have 5 made three pointers (out of 15 attempted three pointers). Or you would note that Kobe Bryant had 60 points and 22 made field goals (great!) in his final NBA game, but he also had 50 attempted field goals (really bad!). A stat shorthand for a great game I’ve seen from time to time is more points than attempted field goals, either through shooting a high percent, 3 pointers, or lots of free throws.
In UK soccer, “making” a goal is not scoring but rather providing an “assist” (an Americanism embraced in the last 20 years).
I’ve been watching soccer for a number of years now and don’t think I’ve heard this as a defined word or phrase – I wonder if it’s falling out of favor. It wouldn’t take me by surprise if someone referred to a player carrying the ball up the pitch and laying it in front of goal for a tap-in as “making the goal” though. But that also wouldn’t surprise me in a similar situation in basketball (e.g. someone driving and kicks the ball out for an open 3 made the basket).
Plenty of other odd American vs. British sports announcer-isms I’ve encountered though, including several phrases used in both countries that mean the exact opposite. In the US, a player who “just about scored that goal” would have barely missed with no goal scored; in the UK from what I can tell they would have barely scored the goal and nearly missed. And in the US “unplayable” means a player is so bad they cannot be played by the coach. In the UK it’s used to mean a player had an incredible game.
I don’t listen to a lot of basketball play-by-play broadcasting but the examples given certainly strike me as unhelpfully redundant. I guess I would want to see a transcript to get a better sense of whether there may be a functional justification where the explicit emphasis prevents a risk of the listener blundering into a misunderstanding, but I can’t immediately guess what that would be.
Probably more common to be confusing on a team level rather than an individual (though I still do think there’s value there). For example, an announcer quickly saying, “So far in this first quarter, the Spurs have 15 field goals and the Thunder only 12”. Is that made or attempted? Probably made, but I don’t think the clarification is redundant, since attempted field goals would also be a perfectly appropriate stat to cite.
JW Brewer, I don’t think that makar would occasion much hilarity, because it would be less likely to bring to mind makhn than makher, which in my NYC Ashkenazi-adjacent Yinglish means something like “big shot in the business world”, or someone who thinks he is.
I imagine that makar began as a calque on Greek poietes.
I’m happy to defer to defer to JH’s superior knowledge of the relevant genre of discourse. In ice hockey, by contrast, one refers e.g. to “shots on goal” rather than “attempted goals” so “goals” then unambiguously means goals. (Although there it’s equally useful as a defensive statistic to see how FEW goals were scored compared to the total number of shots taken, due to the skill of the goalie in preventing shots from maturing into goals.*) Similarly, in baseball one talks of “at-bats” (or “plate appearances” which is not the same thing …) rather than “attempted hits” so “hits” just means hits.
*Not only do basketball teams not have goalies, there’s a technically defined thing called “goaltending” which is explicitly against the rules and will result in a penalty.
@CuC: I am aware of the Yinglish “macher” (as I would spell it), but that just switches the question to whether those who understand machen/makhn in the fecal sense (which I don’t) find macher a giggle-inducing word. Why or why not?
As a kid I encountered it a few times and decided from
context it meant “urinate”!
Glad I never had the chance to try using the phrase in real life.
“three-pointers, baskets, and field goals have by definition been made”
I think Mr. Yagoda is simply wrong here on what the standard usage is. These are all types of *shots*, which may be made or missed. It is completely normal to say something like: “Bob Smith took 8 three-pointers, making 3”, or “John Jones shot lights out, making 18 of 21 field goals”, or “Pete Johnson has a really off night, missing 8 straight baskets at one point”. This is completely unexceptional.
That’s also a thing in German (…regionally as usual), though nothing I know of prevents it from being a loan from Yiddish.
As someone who ticks all of Yagoda’s demographic boxes, I can attest to the Yinglish usage he discusses, which was common in my childhood as a child of immigrants, growing up among many other first and second-generation native New Yorkers. But I don’t find other uses of the verb particularly funny, perhaps because second grade was a long time ago.
BTW, Philologus is, of course, the wonderful Hillel Halkin, to give credit where it’s due.
i don’t know that i’ve heard scatological “make” in the wild; i also wouldn’t’ve immediately named it as specifically a yinglishism (but i’m the 3rd generation born in the u.s., and the immigrant generation of the only part of my family to be that kind of refined were, i believe, hungarian-speakers). especially given the class profile implicit in “refined”, i wonder whether it’s more of a yekke*/yekke-influenced thing, and actually is a comparatively recent loan/calque from german into yiddish rather than being (like most yiddish things that are described as german-derived) cognate.
and i don’t think i’ve ever heard any related punning on “makher”, which feels in line with a yekkish connection and class-bounded useage: “makher” isn’t altogether complimentary, and even when it is, it’s more likely to be used about someone than by them; it’s hard for me to imagine that punning wouldn’t be widespread if the same people were regularly using “makher” and scatological “makhn”. (but makhn is also a verb that extends a good ways out from “make”**, so it might offer too many possibilities to be useful for punning)
objectless “use”, to me, is generally about drugs – e.g. “and then she started using again” – but i feel like i have heard the usage Ryan cited at some point. i’ve definitely heard “i gotta go” in that same kind of context.
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* german jews: actual ashkenazim, rather than yiddish jews.
** in everyday phrases like “vos makhstu?” [how are you?]; as an auxiliary with loshn-koydesh verbs, as in “khorev makhn” [to lay waste, annihilate]; and in idioms of all sorts.
“Wer hat mir auf den Kopf gemacht?”
The English translation is entitled “The little mole who knew it was none of his business”. Not nearly as good. I can’t speak to the rest of the translation, but my daughter loved it, much to the consternation of all the stuffy visiting adults who were made to read it to her.
In English, I think in many places we understand “to go” as meaning to urinate, or perhaps visit the toilet, especially with children: do you need to go? Oooh, the dog went on the carpet! But I can’t think of a parallel construction for shit.
Earlier this morning I overheard some guys talking about a basketball game last night and how a particular player had had a great game scoring fortysome points with twentysome rebounds. So now I’m guessing that “made rebounds” is not a thing people usually say, if only because conventional basketball scorekeeping doesn’t AFAIK track attempts at rebounds that do not succeed, so a total-attempts number is not usually ready to hand?
Rebounds don’t even need to be attempted; sometimes the ball just bounces off the rim and back to a player. Other times, there may be three or four players in the low post who all jump for a rebound, before they even know that a shot isn’t going in. Jostling for the rebounds in situations like that is how loose ball fouls happen. For all these reasons, it really wouldn’t make sense to try to count rebound attempts.
On German Macher: In this meaning, it’s either someone who gets things done or used similar to English “mover and shaker”.
I know this usage of “make” specifically from Dan Avidan, one of the hosts of the YouTube show “Game Grumps”. He is Jewish, about 47 years of age, and grew up in New Jersey. He gave the impression when he brought it up in an episode that he was quoting his elders (who were in turn addressing children) rather than sharing a term he has ever used himself.
Earlier today I saw there was a YouTube video asking whether Germany’s economy minister was a Macherin or something less flattering.
I have used macher once in a comment thread here. I chose that word because of the implication that the person referred to definitely liked to get their finger into every pie.
I agree with Brett re: rebound attempts. Definitely not a thing and not tracked anywhere in conventional stats. Besides that, there often isn’t negative value in attempting to get a rebound and failing; it’s not really analogous to field goals.
There is something called rebound rate though, which is the percent of available rebounds a player gets, often divided into offensive and defensive (offensive rebounds are generally rarer and much more valuable than defensive rebounds). There are also some complicated stats that indicate how well a team rebounds with a player on the floor vs off and how much a player influences team rebounding. I could imagine a person or team tracking how often a player “crashes the glass” for an offensive rebound vs. how often they succeed (there are defensive trade-offs there), which is essentially rebounds attempted. I doubt they call it that though.
It was Victor Wembenyama with 41 and 24 last night, albeit in double overtime. He’s often “Wemby”, due to our American fear of long, foreign surnames.
Another basketball connection that’s completely coincidental: there was a former NBA player with the surname Maker. Thon Maker, a Sudanese-Australian former high draft pick with a not very illustrious career. I believe the name was pronounced completely differently though, so maybe no humorous to Ashkenazis of a certain age.
As Jewish slang, I’ve encountered “make” as far west as the Upper Midwest.
As for the initial gripe about “made baskets” and “made three pointers,” etc., if Ben Yagoda aware of how meticulously basketball fans track attempted shots of all kinds? I think if I talked about “baskets” around any of my basketball-loving friends, they would ask me “which kind, made or attempted?” Yes, you can call them all “shots,” but I think there is some method to the supposed redundancy.
I’m not a basketball fan, but it seems abundantly clear to me from the comments in this thread that Yagoda’s “made” peeve is even more weird and personal than most peeves.
It is completely normal to say something like: “Bob Smith took 8 three-pointers, making 3”
I think the objection is to ‘made’ as an adjective – as if you had to say ‘Celtic were leading by 2 scored goals to 1’. It’s not a goal if you haven’t scored it.
It does sound kind of daft to me, not knowing basketball, but it sounds like it’s become one of those things like snail mail, where the distinction came in over time.