Ben Yagoda’s post on nosh makes interesting reading; he begins with his response to an interviewer who “mentioned she is married to a British person, and thus has been exposed to Britishisms like ‘posh’ and ‘nosh’”:
I immediately corrected her, saying that “nosh” is Yiddish.
Well, I was right, but she was right, too.
The word derives from the German naschen, meaning to nibble. It shows up in English as a verb in the late 1800s, and shortly after that as a noun, meaning a snack. I was familiar with both forms in my Jewish-American boyhood in the 1960s, and recall going to a Miami Beach restaurant called La Noshery (“noshery” or “nosherie” is an establishment where one noshes).
But Ngram Viewer reveals that, at least until quite recently, “nosh” was significantly more popular in the U.K. than the U.S. […] There are also specifically British variants, including (along the lines of “fry-up” and “cock-up) the noun “nosh-up”; a line in Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1998) is, “I’ll give the auld doll this: she always made a good nosh-up.” And I’ll note that one difference in American and British use of the word is that here, it’s mainly a snack, while there, it can be a full meal.
In addition, Green’s Dictionary of Slang reports, “nosh” in the U.K can refer an act of fellatio. That particular meaning led to a notorious email that restaurant reviewer Giles Coren wrote to his editors at The Times, and what was subsequently leaked to The Guardian.
I urge you to go to the link to read Coren’s anguished e-mail (which ends “You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy?”), but what struck me was the ‘fellatio’ sense, of which I had no idea. I might have thought it was exaggerated, but a comment by Nick L. Tipper (reproduced at the Facebook post Ben made about it) says:
The sharp turning point shown in Ben’s Ngram of GB usage of ‘nosh’ appears to be about 2010. At that time, I was heavily criticised – and ridiculed – by a colleague for using ‘nosh’ as a reference to food. In his mind, the word had only one meaning – the oral sex one which ‘gobble’ has acquired – and nosh meaning ‘food’, ‘meal’ or ‘eat’ was an archaic usage.
(Cue rant about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket and people today can only think about sex.)
…all of which serves as an excuse to link to Posh Nosh! Richard E. Grant, always sublime!
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3H6z037pboFfElefmrkvf_NqndEdYQgQ&si=_nCuaKnQML-x7544
Like many other Jewish-Americans (I could guess at a few here), I’ve been familiar with “nosh” since childhood, but only as a verb. There’s also a mass noun, “nosherei”, meaning snacks. “Nosh” as a noun does sound British to me.
Everyone’s obsession with sex doesn’t mean he world is going to hell in a handbasket. It means the world sucks.
FWIW the phrase “have a nosh” (thus using “nosh” as a noun) can be found in the 2003 edition of Leo Rosten’s _The New Joys of Yiddish: Completely Updated_. Rosten himself died in 1997, but I should hope that whoever did the posthumous updating (and I have no idea if this wording was or wasn’t in prior editions published in his lifetime) had some direct familiarity with the speech of Ashkenazic-Americans.
Wiktionary says the sexual sense of “nosh” in BrEng is from Polari. Although they would say that, wouldn’t they?
The last version of Rosten’s book that he personally revised was called The Joys of Yinglish. Any more recent version than that is probably a phony.
This logic where a parallel obscene meaning can make a current usage “archaic” is funny.
The lexicographer (amateur or professional) feels awkward when someone uses the word this way. So something must be wrong with it. But she does not have the descriptive spirit to write or say: “it makes me blush”. So…
Colloquial?
Vulgar?
Proscribed (grey-haired teacher telling kids to apply it only to oral sex)?
Offensive?
Regional, dialectal?
…
I have now dug a little deeper and can confirm for Brett that “have a nosh” (actually, “So have a nosh,” as a complete sentence) appears in the echt-Rosten _Joys of Yinglish_, published in 1989. For a more recent usage, this is from the author’s afterword to Seth H. Bramson’s 2020 _Lost Restaurants of Miami_:
“And now, as we come to the end of this volume, I hope that not only did you enjoy the reading and the images but that, along the way, you got hungry enough to stop and have a nosh while warmly remembering the great times, the great food and the great fun you and your family and friends had at the lost restaurants of Greater Miami.” I don’t *think* that’s the British-sexual-slang sense.
No; meaning “to eat a little bit of a delicacy, almost always sweets”.
British nosh is interesting because I tend to think of the adaptation of Yiddish a with short o (lox, schlong, tchotchke, etc.) as an American thing.
Re: nouning, BrEng seems more inclined to do that with all verbs – have a lie down, have a think, etc.
Don’t I have the real Joys of Yiddish? I do. 1968 (1970 printing). And yes, contrary to what I remember from childhood, it has
“1. A snack, a tidbit, a bite, a small portion.
“2. Anything eaten between meals and, presumably, in small quantity: fruit, a cookie, ‘a piece cake’, a candy.”
It adds,
“Many delicatessen counters display plates with small slices of salami, or pieces of halvah, with a legend affixed to a toothpick: ‘Have a nosh.’ The nosh is not free, but cheap.”
Ex-Brit speaking; was last in Blighty in 2010; had no idea ‘nosh’ had acquired a sense ‘fellatio’, so Coren’s play would have been completely lost on me. (I blame the rellies for failing to keep me abreast.)
Come to that: I’m very familiar with ‘nosh’, had no idea it was from Yiddish: like ‘posh’ I’da thought it too informal to be a ‘proper’ word.
Ref @Jerry, no there’s nothing ‘tidbit’/small about a Brit ‘nosh’: it’s typically a full plate meal. The definition etymonline gives is just wrong for the Brit sense. Wikti’s isn’t really adequate either.
I see wikti claims the fellatio sense is from Polari, which would long pre-date 2010, and be more Brit than US. Can anyone confirm?
GDOS suggests nosh “snack” > nosh-up “feast” > nosh “feast”. Its first fellatio cites are 1998 as a noun but 1972 US as a verb.
In other words, it is too expressive for food.
Like, those berries/candies/cookies/… are too tasty.
Let’s reclassify them as a sex variety. Let’s hide them from kids.
The 1972 US citation for the sexual sense of “to nosh” is not in running prose or dialogue but in a dictionary of subcultural slang – one which has FWIW attracted the following online criticism: “Much evidence that several queens pulled the collator’s leg and invented gay slang on the spot. Some definitions flatly in error. But book tended to be taken as an authority.” Less skeptically, while one would have to inquire further to be sure, it seems quite possible that a San-Francisco-published lexicon of gay slang might be sufficiently cosmopolitan in outlook as to include items of British origin that were not at the time in active use in the American subculture, such that the Americanness of the place of publication is not itself evidence of American use.
The British cites seem to use “nosh” irrespective of whether the nosher is male or female. Whether it was once a markedly “gay” slang lexeme that then spread more widely or whether it had that breadth of use in Polari or whatever is not clear to me.
Like AntC, I grew up thinking that ‘nosh’ was English slang (of unknown origin) and only later realized it was also a yiddish word. But there were a few yiddishisms floating around in England, often used by people who had no idea of where they came from. Schmatta was another, as I recall, meaning a piece of cloth.
Some of these words showed up in BBC comedy shows, many of whose writers were Jewish, although innocents such as me had no idea at the time.
i’d tend to gloss (u.s.) “nosh” as “graze” rather than “snack”, because to me it has a connotation of continuousness or extended duration as well as small amounts – one of those little packets of peanut-butter crackers isn’t really a nosh (which doesn’t feel wrong or alien to me, but i wouldn’t be likely to say*), to me, but a plate of crackers and a little bowl of a spread is, even if (maybe especially if) only a few are eaten at a time.
.
* except in forms like “have a nosh”, which isn’t as far as i know, but feels like, a calque of a yiddish periphrastic construction like “maskim zayn” [to agree] or “moyre hobn” [to fear].
When I read from Hat’s post here that nosh was from Yiddish, I was actually quite surprised, because I have become accustomed to think of Yiddish borrowings as one thing that really sets American English apart from UK English; words like shlep and shmuck and putz are not anything I have ever heard from a Brit.
Well, if we buy the theory that Polari was the vector by which “nosh” got into wider BrEng usage, Yiddish is reportedly one significant source (albeit certainly not the most significant) of Polari lexemes.
Query:if British nosh is from the German naschen, meaning to nibble, is there any connection with the British (but possibly not US) phrase “to gnash one’s teeth”?.
In the north of England, all we mean when we say “nosh” is food. Nothing more, nothing less. Food. The fellatio connotation is totally lost on me, so Giles Coren’s rant (apart from being badly-worded and in dire need of an edit) sounds like a rant about something he’s familiar with (Yiddish) but most people living above Watford Junction aren’t. It’s a silly, childish rant about a trifle and doesn’t do him any favours at all. But it is a demonstration of what we refer to as the north-south divide in the UK.
My grandma, a LItvak raised in Leeds, always said “nash” with something like an a. Definitely Yiddish for her! But it seemed a thing of schoolboy comics slang to me, something you could read in Beano or whatever.
if British nosh is from the German naschen, meaning to nibble,
Well, it’s from a Yiddish word related to German naschen, not from German directly. It can be translated as “to nibble”, but it really means “to graze, to eat tidbits”, and also “to pinch (a small portion) of food”, like e.g. a couple of fries from someone else’s plate. Checking gnash on Etymonline and naschen at DWB doesn’t show a connection; Grimm adduces an Old English hnasc as cognate, without giving its meaning. So the anlaut doesn’t match.
There’s an establishment in the town near where I live that makes prepared meals (to be microwaved when you get them home). They call themselves Top Nosh Meals.
In Yiddish, there is no other words than “nash” and “nashn” (and oyfnashn, onnashn) except maybe in the “south-ukrainian” dialect called “tote-mome yidish”.
It’s a silly, childish rant about a trifle and doesn’t do him any favours at all.
Agree. And the “joke” was stupid and childish as well, and the editors probably made the right decision to remove it (if they were even aware that’s what he was trying to do).