My final post from David Daiches’ Two Worlds (see this post), from chapter 7, is probably the most Hattic of the lot; it’s about Scots Yiddish, which intrigued me in 2014:
The morning slow train from Edinburgh to Dundee used to stop (as I suppose it still does) at many of the Fife coast towns on the way. This is why the train used to be, in the 1920s, the favourite mode of transport of those Edinburgh Jews who made a precarious living as itinerant salesmen, peddling anything from sewing needles to ready-made dresses among the good housewives and fisherfolk of Fife. They were the ‘trebblers’, in their own Scots-Yiddish idiom; they had come as young men from Lithuania or Poland seeking freedom and opportunity but somehow had never got on as they had planned. Those with more push and enterprise had moved westward to Glasgow and often on from there to America; a few had managed to build up flourishing businesses in Edinburgh; but the trebblers were the failures, who spent their days carrying their battered suitcases from door to door in the little grey towns of Fife, to return home in the evening with a pound gained to a shabby but comfortable flat in one of the more run-down districts of Edinburgh. There, in old stone buildings where the gentry and nobility of Scotland had lived in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, within a stone’s throw of the ‘Royal Mile’ with its violent and picturesque historical associations, they re-created the atmosphere of the Ghetto and lived a life of self-contained Jewish orthodoxy. Edinburgh, one of the few European capitals with no anti-semitism in its history, accepted them with characteristic cool interest. In its semi-slums they learned such English as they knew, which meant in fact that they grafted the debased Scots of the Edinburgh streets on to their native Yiddish to produce one of the most remarkable dialects ever spoken by man. (Yet not such a comically incredible speech as my American friends seem to imagine: Scots preserves many Germanic words lost in standard English and found, in a similar or even identical form, in Yiddish, as ‘lift’ for air (German Luft), ‘licht’ for light (identical in Scots, German and Yiddish), ‘hoast’ for cough (German husten). Douglas Young has pointed out that Goethe’s last words, ‘mehr licht’, would have been pronounced the same in Scots, ‘mair licht’; and they would be the same in Yiddish.) Their sons and daughters, making full use of the city’s admirable educational facilities, grew up to be doctors and scientists and professors, changing their names from Pinkinsky to Penn, from Finkelstein to Fenton, from Turiansky to Torrence. But they themselves, the Scottish-Jewish pioneers who never quite got where they wanted to go, changed nothing. On Fridays in the winter, when the sun set early, they would be home by the middle of the afternoon, to welcome the sabbath. On Saturday, of course, as well as on all Jewish festivals, there was no ‘trebbling’. And on weekdays in the Dundee train they would chant their morning prayers, strapping their phylacteries on to arm and forehead.
It was a strange thing to see, a compartment full of trebblers at their morning prayers. They were rarely interrupted by Gentiles. They had perfected a technique for getting compartments to themselves, and even if they had not, it would have taken a hardy outsider to enter a compartment where a swaying, bearded figure stood chanting at the window. Old Moishe Pinkinsky, a huge round-shouldered man with a red beard and a peculiar fierceness of gesticulation (which belied the essential gentleness of his nature), scared off many a would-be interloper. Once, however, when the train was particularly crowded, a desperate latecomer did succeed in entering the compartment occupied by Moishe and his companions. He sat in astonished silence while the trebblers concluded their devotions, and then listened, bewildered, as they talked to each other in Yiddish. But Moishe had a kind heart, and he felt sorry for this lost soul sitting opposite him. He took down a brown paper parcel from the rack and extracted from it a huge sandwich of black bread and chopped herring. This he broke in two, and keeping half for himself he handed the other half to the fearful Gentile. ‘Nem!’ (‘take!’) he said kindly. The man’s name was Mackenzie, and he was an insurance agent on his way to Burntisland: he later told the story to his friends in an Edinburgh bar. ‘I ate for dear life,’ he said. ‘And, you know, it tasted damn good. Some kind of caviare.’
The anecdote I have just told was part of the Edinburgh Jewish folklore which grew up in the city in the first quarter of this century. I cannot vouch for its literal truth, any more than I can for the effectiveness of the trebblers’ devotions in scaring away non-Jewish passengers. But these stories are all probable in the Aristotelian sense. I myself, on the one occasion when I went to Dundee on that train, saw the trebblers in their special compartments, a voluntary and jealously preserved segregation. Recently I received a letter from the son of the man who was stationmaster at one of the small railway stations where the earliest trebblers would alight; he told me how, at the very beginning of this century, these Jewish immigrants, not yet knowing any English, would converse with his father, they talking in Yiddish and he in broad Scots, with perfectly adequate mutual intelligibility. Scots-Yiddish as a working language must have been developing rapidly in the years immediately preceding the First World War. It must have been one of the most short-lived languages in the world. I should guess that 1912 to 1940 was the period of its flourishing. The younger generation, who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, of course did not speak it, though they knew Yiddish; and while there is an occasional old man in Edinburgh who speaks it today, one has to seek it out in order to find it, and in another decade it will be gone for ever. ‘Aye man, ich hob’ getrebbelt mit de five o’clock train,’ one trebbler would say to another. ‘Vot time’s yer barmitzvie, laddie?’ I was once asked. ‘Ye’ll hae a drap o’ bramfen (whisky). It’s Dzon Beck. Ye ken: “Nem a schmeck fun Dzon Beck.”’ (‘Take a peg of John Begg’, the advertising slogan of John Begg whisky.)
There was one word in the Scots-Yiddish vocabulary that has always puzzled me: this was ‘bleggage’, applied to an ill-behaved youngster. My father used to maintain that it was a corruption of ‘blackguard’, and perhaps it was a mixture of “‘blackguard’ and ‘baggage’. Whatever its origin, it was a fine, expressive word, and it was never more effectively used than one sabbath morning in 1919 when a number of enterprising youngsters had climbed on to the roof of the Graham Street synagogue and were making a noise on the skylight. The chazan (cantor) stopped his singing, banged his large prayer book with the flat of his hand, and cried out: ‘Shah! Mak a quietness! Bleggages!’ This was just after my father had accepted his appointment as Edinburgh rabbi, and the incident was symbolic of the kind of chaos he was determined to put a stop to.
We ourselves had little contact with what might be called the trebbling stratum of Edinburgh Jews. […] Moishe and his like were regarded in our family with affectionate indulgence as interesting examples of a transitional stage in the emancipation from the Ghetto.
I think now that they had more to offer than our aristocratic family attitude conceded. They had a folk wisdom of their own, and a tremendous emotional vitality in their way of living. I remember Motty Rifkind, a shambling, grizzled man, the elder of two extremely pious brothers. He sat next to me once in shul one Passover morning, and was indignant with some young men, infrequent visitors to the synagogue, who were chattering loudly throughout the chazan’s repetition of the Amidah (an important prayer, with ‘eighteen benedictions’, which the congregation recite first, standing, and then the chazan repeats). As old Motty himself used the synagogue as if it were his club, sleeping, snoring, talking, arguing, or praying as the spirit moved him, I was a little surprised at his stern view of the talkers, and indicated as much. In reply he told me a story. “Two men’, he said, ‘vent into a poob and ordered a glass beer. Dey hadna been in dat poob more dan vonce or tvice before. Vell, day sip deir beer un’ dey sit talking un’ shmoosing (chatting). Dey sit un’ talk un’ talk. At lest de barman leans over de counter und he says to dem: “Drink op yer beer. Get oot frae here. Ye coom into ma poob vonce year un’ ye tink ye can sit here un’ shmoos for hours as do’ ye owned de place. Ma regular customers can sit un’ talk over deir beer as long as dey like. But no’ you. Oot!” Nu, dat’s hoo it is mit a shul, I come here every week und Hakodosh boruch hu (“the Holy One, blessed be He”, that is God) kens me vell, un’ he don’t mind if I take it easy. But dese bleggages, dat come vonce or tvice a year — no! Dey daven (pray) or dey shot op.’ […]
There are many other older Jewish characters who come to mind as I think of my childhood in Edinburgh. There is little Mr Lurie, who sat next to me in shul, who still greets me when I come back to Edinburgh and revisit the familiar synagogue with: ‘Sholom aleichem (‘peace be with you’). Vell Davie howyer keepin?’ ‘Howyer keepin?’, spoken in a peculiarly clipped accent, is the special way of greeting someone after long absence among these older Edinburgh Jews. Sometimes it is varied with, ‘Keepin alright?’ with a strong, upswinging interrogative inflection on the ‘alright’ (and sometimes an indeterminate vowel creeps its way in between the ‘all’ and the ‘right’). There was Mr Solstone the tailor, dead many years now, whose beautiful new car (or was it his son’s?) rolled backwards and fell over what he persisted in calling ‘de barrication’ beside Peebles Hydro. And I must not close these reminiscences without some mention of Yudel Simenoff, a man who combined extreme Jewish piety with Marxist orthodoxy and who, by reason of some palatal defect, was unable to speak his Scots-Yiddish dialect (for he, too, was one of the trebblers) without a whole battery of incidental spluttering noises. There were not more than half-a-dozen people in Edinburgh, outside his immediate family, who could understand him, and when he arose, as he unfailingly did, to make some remarks during the question period that followed the weekly lecture at the Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society, there were few if any who understood what he was talking about. Through hearing him often enough, I finally learned to understand him, and found to my surprise that he was in his way a learned and intelligent man, who knew a considerable amount about both Jewish folklore and folksong (his speech defect disappeared when he sang) and modern economics. In later life he began to write letters to the Edinburgh evening papers on economic and political affairs, and his opinions aroused respectful interest in many quarters. This was some twenty years ago, and when I was in Edinburgh soon after the war ended I did not expect to find him still flourishing. But I found that he had been discovered by the folklorists and had just been engaged to make some recordings of Jewish folksong and liturgical chants for the B.B.C. I realised then that somebody should have recorded the speech of Motty Rifkind and Moishe Pinkinsky in the 1920s and 1930s, the golden years of Scots—Yiddish. But nobody had thought of it then, and it was too late now.
(An earlier version of the chapter was published in the June 11, 1954, issue of the New Yorker as “Trebblers, Bleggages, Persians.”) The word trebbler is in both Wiktionary and the DSL, but it’s illustrated only with a quote from Daiches, as is the DSL bleggage entry; I wonder if either has any recorded existence outside his memoir?
(The quoted text has the original line breaks. You might want to remove them.)
Oh, traivellers! It took ‘trebbling’ for me to get that.
I like ‘characteristic cool interest’.
I have found Scots useful for understanding things in both Norwegian and Flemish Dutch – partly vocabulary, but more the greater similarity of vowel sounds.
The politician Malcolm Rifkind was born in Edinburgh, so presumably that’s his family.
Why is Simenoff spelt with an e instead of another o, regardless of how the i is pronounced? Is it (a) because the name was simplified from Simeonoff by dropping o after e? (b) because a Cyrillic e was used in a document and the transcriber did not know e would not be interpreted as ë in English? (c) just random?
(The quoted text has the original line breaks. You might want to remove them.)
OK, I think I’ve got them all — sorry about that.
Ivor Cutler’s surname, I learn, was anglicized from Kushner.
Great heavens!
they would chant their morning prayers, strapping their phylacteries on to arm and forehead.
I was surprised to learn a few years ago that for a large number of people, “phylactery” now means a storage container for the soul of a powerful and evil undead wizard (a “lich”).
@Jen: It took ‘trebbling’ for me to get that
It took your comment for me to get it.
Fun fact: the verbs “to treble” and “to travel” are, if not literally etymological doublets, rather closer than one might have thought. (Treble from Latin “triplus” is pretty transparent – the semantic drift of “travel” from its ultimate Latin etymon is less obvious …)
And Spanish tripulación, the vrew of a ship or a plane, is unrelated to ‘travel’.
Dungeons & Dragons comes with a lot of terminology like this.
“the debased Scots of the Edinburgh streets”
My Edinburgh friends would like a word with the author.
Am I the only one for whom “one of the few European capitals with no anti-semitism in its history” evokes the anti-Semitic joke Mr Deasy tells Stephen Dedalus in _Ulysses_? (“Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews.” etc.) Presumably that was not Daiches’ intent, but still …
There was a significant Jewish contingent among my schoolfellows in Glasgow. They were officially excused from our class prayers and RE lessons, but apart from that I don’t think that anyone really thought anything much about it. The true exotics to us were Roman Catholics. I didn’t know any Catholics at all. They all went to some other school somewhere. I don’t think we had enough bigotry left over to be antisemitic as well.
David E.’s insight aligns with the wikipedia statement that “William Kenefick of Dundee University has claimed that bigotry was diverted away from Jews by anti-Catholicism, particularly in Glasgow where the main ethnic chauvinist agitation was against Irish Catholics.” This I think in the context of the 1930’s where as a bonus the more thuggish Protestant extremists allegedly got into street fights (making a tactical alliance with Communists in the process) against Oswald Mosley’s crew, suspecting that Fascism with its Italian roots was some sort of Popish plot.
Wikipedia elsewhere confirms that (as one might have supposed) the even-tinier-than-previous current Jewish population of Scotland is not evenly distributed. I recall being in Stornoway some three decades ago with my beloved late first wife where she was struck by the odd-feeling (to her*) possibility that she was at that moment the only Jew on the entire island of Harris/Lewis. Resources at hand (like a hard copy local phone book entirely devoid of Cohens or Levys) did not contradict this possibility, and it was not possible in those days to use a mobile phone to consult wikipedia and learn that (I think this is as of the 2011 census?) there were said to be exactly three Jews residing somewhere in the Outer Hebrides.
*Maybe the island angle exacerbated this? I think she had spent a summer as a teenager in a small village in rural France where she was the only Jew within a radius of some meaningful number of kilometers, but there was in principle some French synogogue one could get to from that village without having to take a ferry.
How many non-Scots/non-French were there of any kind, in the Hebrides or rural France?
I recall years ago reading an account of the daughter of a Pakistani shopkeeper on Lewis sitting outside chattering with her friends in Gaelic.
On the topic of admirably enterprising tradespeople, when I was in Tamale in northern Ghana, I used to visit a very good Chinese restaurant. (The waitresses were the Chinese-Dagomba daughters of the owner. They were very striking.)
Dapaong, in the far north of Togo, had (and I daresay still has) a very good Vietnamese restaurant. But that’s less surprising. Francophones are more committed to the eating out thing than stodgy Anglophones. There was, alas, nothing comparable over on the Ghana side at that latitude, in Bawku.
@Y: there was just enough Hebridean representation of the Pakistani diaspora by then that we dined on excellent curry in Stornoway. The opinion that the Jews of France are by definition non-French is, I believe, somewhat politically controversial. One difference is that essentially 100% of the Jewish population of Scotland is the result of immigration within the last two centuries or so whereas the Jewish presence in France goes back (admittedly with some periods of discontinuity due to expulsions and returns) to Roman times.
We took other vacations to other islands (e.g. in the Caribbean) that may perhaps have had zero living permanent-resident Jews but it perhaps seemed more plausible there that at any given moment the current inventory of American tourists would supply some others. Indeed, on e.g. Nevis there are various historical markers and whatnot about the long-gone Sephardic community that lived there in the 17th/18th centuries whose existence is motivated at least in part by tourism considerations.
Reminds me of the (probably apocryphal, alas) anecdote about a foreign visitor to Belfast in worse times, who was stopped in the street by a gang who demanded to know if he was Protestant or Catholic. When he replied that he was a Jew, the next question was “But are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?”
(Certainly apocryphal, I’d have thought …)
Maybe not. Belfast people (of whom I once knew many) are not devoid of a sense of humour (including self-mockery.)
“Scots preserves many Germanic words lost in standard English and found, in a similar or even identical form, in Yiddish, as ‘lift’ for air (German Luft)”
Thanks for that.
There’s a line in Sir Patrick Spens:
“The lift grew dark and the wind blew loud”
Now I understand.
Always learning something new.
Hat, why are you so surprised at Cutler < Kushner?
Speaking of Kushner/Kushnir ‘furrier’, cf. German Kürschner, ultimately a loan (says WAry) from Proto-Slavic kъrzьno ‘fur coat’, which then is “an eastern borrowing” (sic). It gets compared to Ossetian, (dialectal) Georgian, or handwaved as derived from “a Siberian language”, or “some northern language”. Or maybe it comes from PIE *krok-no-, from *(s)ker- ‘to cut’ (Pokorny).
Huh.
Always learning something new.
This thread is the sort of glory the Hattery surpasses all.
They were officially excused from our class prayers and RE lessons, but apart from that I don’t think that anyone really thought anything much about it. The true exotics to us were Roman Catholics. …
Yes my suburban W. Ĺondon school was nominally Protestant-ish, but there were plenty of students whose backgrounds were not. The only one whose parents insisted he be excused assembly and RE was RC. (That is to say the parents were RC. The student was just embarrassed.)
“the debased Scots of the Edinburgh streets”
My Edinburgh friends would like a word with the author.
Yes, “debased” in linguistic contexts seems to mean “modified by poor people.”
Or at least by some group of people less powerful than the dominant group, if not actually poor.
Maybe not.
But … I was just riffing obliquely on divergency in meanings. SOED, for apocryphal:
We can perhaps agree: that the anecdote is apocryphal by elements of meaning 1 (“of doubtful authenticity; spurious, … mythical”), and that it may be apocryphal by all of meaning 3.
And every bit as relevant for our times is this from Joseph Addison:
Either or both? Doesn’t matter. Off to El Salvador with her!
Re “debased Scots of the Edinburgh streets”, it may be the hearer is reacting not to phonology or lexicon, but to the things described…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PsBkecwUy0Q
The speaker is clearly a raconteur, but this is rather gritty.
Nat Shockley: Yes, “debased” in linguistic contexts seems to mean “modified by poor people.”
Or “not refined by aspiring people”. My understanding is that urban basolects usually* are conservative, though maybe not always on the socially important shibboleths.
* with caveats for very cosmopolitan cities
Hat, why are you so surprised at Cutler < Kushner?
They just seem very different; I would never have guessed it.
Sticking this here just because it’s a live thread: it just came to my attention that on Friday the Grauniad ran a belated obituary for our much-missed commenter zyphophile alias Martyn Cornell, with various life details you might not have known, including his composition (whilst employed as a subeditor for the Times) of a humorous headline that to his surprise was published without any changes: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/aug/15/martyn-cornell-obituary
…sure, if we can let a *-ḱ- drop from the heavens… then the first vowel or lack thereof would still need an explanation.
Thanks for that obit, JWB; it really does round out my sense of the guy. And “Foot heads arms body” is a great headline.
Another account of Ivor Cutler I read says his ancestral family name was “Kussner”. Interpolating between the two and bearing in mind the family was from Łódź, I figure it was spelled Kuszner, and that the clerk who allegedly anglicized the name read the <u> as STRUT, not FOOT, which makes “Cutler” more understandable.
bigotry was diverted away from Jews by anti-Catholicism
Still true in Ulster-Scots West Virginia, at least in my youth.
David M.,
I think Hat has cut off posting on the Jaynes thread. I’ll reply to your voter registration comment here since it’s another active thread where you’re posting.
Elements of the first article you linked are directly related to my own disillusionment with the theory of “vote suppression”.
James Baiye, the voter whose anecdote makes up the lead and the sad conclusion, was a plaintiff in a court case against that purge. At some point in 2020, I looked into it. He didn’t merely “spend a few years in North Carolina playing football.” He stayed on after college and registered to vote there. That is a very normal reason for losing your right to vote in another state. There is no system here that can work where you can be left on the rolls in multiple states.
This issue of failure to find a genuine plaintiff has plagued Georgia “anti-suppression” activists. An earlier Georgia lawsuit, in roughly 2013, against a voter ID law, was thrown out when it was discovered that the plaintiff had one of the listed forms of ID. I have more than just ideas about why it’s so difficult to find plaintiffs that illustrate their claims. I’m not sure the defendants in the Baiye case ever recognized the situation. I think one of the factors here is the theme of the Big Short. Almost nobody in the US does the math.
The article follows anecdote with galling evidence, 70,000 of those who had been “purged” re-registered at the same address, WHOOPS, I mean in the same county. The horrifying situation here is that people got a card saying, hi, you used to be registered in Alpharetta, but we think you live in Atlanta now, and they returned the card saying yes, please register me at my address in Atlanta.
Moving elsewhere is one of the bedrock reasons for taking someone off the roles. Why? Because otherwise, local elections become a mockery.
In one of the communities whose vote fraud cases I investigated (a small suburb in a major metropolitan area, there were many more violations, including a confession that our prosecutor refused to follow up on. It seemed to my office that she was only willing to prosecute cases where the votes had not been cast because prosecuting successful vote fraud might undercut partisan arguments.
We found various forms of fraud in the village – cases like that in the prosecution, where absentee applications had been submitted on behalf of people no longer living there or in a couple cases deceased. We had voters showing up for same day registration with faked proof of residence (this was the story behind the confession that the prosecutor refused.)
And we had people who clearly lived elsewhere coming back to vote in the local elections.
Why? In a small village, every vote might be the deciding one, as the naive and inspiring story goes. The competition in this village was not to convince the legitimate voters (through excellent public service, or through a stirring vision for what could be done.) Instead, it was to round up every illegitimate vote.
In the investigation the led to the conviction in my link, we found three sets of 8-10 fraudulent absentee applications and arranged a sting. We were horrified to discover that not only did the ballots return, with matching outer-envelope handwriting and ink and identical in-set markings of candidates. Chillingly, the pattern in set A didn’t match set B. In other words, two sides were competing on this basis. We were unable to identify who sent set B back. There were three slates in the active contest in this village. Weirdly, none of the ballots in the third set were returned. To me, this implicated the third campaign. Otherwise, you’d think that the concern that led to their not returning this batch would’ve also deterred them on the other batch.
The result of a culture of vote fraud in this village are clear. At the time, the school district there had the second highest spending per student in the state, among hundreds of districts. You might think this would result in a high teacher-student ratio, but no, that ratio was quite low. But it had the highest administrator-student ratio in the state. The guy who helped you get elected would have to have a teaching certificate to be a teacher, but you can hire anyone to be the deputy director of school sanitation services.
They had if not the worst educational outcomes in the state, among the worst.
So I am very much in favor of requiring people to be registered where they live, not where they (or someone else) want to vote.
Two years after the election for which I built the case that got the conviction above, I built further cases, based on visual IDs from election judges of voters whose signatures didn’t match their registrations, and who showed up on security camera outside the polling place. The election judges themselves sought the video the day the ballots were cast. A local woman who I made contact with was willing to look at the video and confirm that these people were not the voters they had signed in as. But I didn’t go on that. I found the facebook profiles for the voters, and for the people who my local contact said were the voters. Found both for I believe 5 out 7 in question. The people in the video matched the people identified by my contact quite clearly, in all five cases. They were clearly not the voters whose registrations they cast ballots under.
The prosecutor didn’t seek to interview the witnesses for months, then showed them snapshots of the suspects and when they couldn’t name them, threw out the case. (Despite contemporaneous emails from them saying “that woman is the one who signed in as x…”)
Consider how difficult it is to actually put together such a case. There is absolutely no reason to believe these were the only 7 fraudulent votes in this village that year.
Please note the impact in the article you cited — 4,575 who re-registered post-election in the same county (again, not at the same address). The voters in strong Abrams precincts made up 51.7% of the strong Abrams/strong Kemp total, so one would expect that there were 3.4% more Abrams voters among them – so the disparate impact was potentially 155 votes. There may have been other categories, so I don’t mean to say that was the full total. On the other hand, it’s also possible that some of these people only registered later because they didn’t care to vote in 2018, or even because they were living or even voted somewhere else.
At any rate, Abrams lost by more than 50,000 votes, a couple orders of magnitude more.
155 votes is somewhat lower but in the same ballpark as where I might have estimated fraudulent votes in the local elections in my metro area before leaving that office. There are four villages where I knew or suspected impact, though not all at an outcome-determining level.
This is what Raffensperger means. There is not an epidemic of vote fraud. There is vote fraud, which has devastating effects on some small, poor communities. And there is not an epidemic of vote suppression, though there are rules put in place to avoid vote fraud that disenfranchise small numbers of people, with much less disparate impact than is believed.
And then there are Dems, who scream that Republicans have suppressed hundreds of thousands of votes, and say that vote fraud is “insignificant”. And Republicans, who scream that a Presidential election was stolen, and that votes are never suppressed.
Dems believe the typically lower turnouts in minority communities are because of disenfranchisement. I’ve come to believe that in some, it is instead disillusionment, in part motivated by horrendous local government and the impossibility of accountability because local elites are able to use various illicit means when the votes are needed. “Calling in the cavalry when we need it” as one informant put it. He was complaining that fraud led to his loss and asking us to investigate. Said he knew exactly what had happened because he used to work with them and told us that phrase. Then realized he’d incriminated himself and promptly shut up. I would’ve been willing to overlook his self-incrimination to get at the ongoing fraud, but we had no way of knowing which registrations were used or who was behind it.
So no legal case. In the calculation that American Public Media and others use to get to “a billion votes cast and only a few hundred instances of vote fraud”, the two villages I’ve cited score as tens of thousands of votes (over the couple decades that “anti-suppression” activists use for their denominator) and zero convictions in cases involving successful fraud. A huge win for the “vote fraud doesn’t matter” argument.
I don’t agree with everything Georgia has done to make fraud more difficult, which has suppressed more votes that necessary. I don’t agree with everything my state has done to make voting easier, which has facilitated fraud in some ways. What I believe is that less lying on both sides would lead to a much better outcome. And that the biggest winners would be residents of small, often minority communities plagued by corrupt administrations they can’t get rid of.
I really, really don’t want people exchanging dueling million-word comments about things like voter registration. If you have a point you feel needs to be made, please make it concisely. And the reason I closed commenting on the other thread (which I hate doing and haven’t done in years) is because I hate these irrelevant arguments; I would really appreciate it if people would just let it go and not find other threads to carry them on in. Am I going to have to start routinely closing threads as I did in the bad old days of floods of spam comments?
Sure. Sorry. I tried to be temperate here, and hopefully that helps, but I understand your feelings and will certainly follow your directive.
Is that a reason to prevent people from voting in statewide elections, though?
You’ve posted about your fraud cases before, and I agree with you on that topic.
Alas, Quote Investigator found no corroboration that “Foot Heads Arms Body” ever ran as a headline in the Times or any other newspaper. Martyn Cornell may have sincerely misremembered, or he may have been taking the piss — considering all the specific details he added, it sounds to me like the latter. Too bad Quote Investigator didn’t try to contact him directly before it was too late. And now the Guardian has repeated the legend twice.
As QI documents, the line appeared in print in the 1970s as a joking suggestion, and then people started repeating it as true. Foot was known for supporting nuclear disarmament, but he was never in charge of a body, committee, etc. about it. There was a protracted wrangle in Foot’s Wikipedia page on how to describe the legend, and whether to include it at all; I think they’ve done pretty well, no thanks to the Guardian.
(One of the jokes was in response to a real Guardian headline “Foot hits back on Nazi comparison”, which I’d guess wasn’t an intentional pun.)
(Yes, Foot was prominently involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament ever since it was founded in 1957, but he was never its head.)
I’m not sure what it says about either of them, but the thing I most prominently remember about Michael Foot is that for decades Jill Craigie didn’t tell him about her rape, because she was convinced that Foot would have had Koestler killed.
I see that Koestler coined “mimophant”, a word whose hour has surely come.
Re Cutler/Kushner: New York City is full of Shermans, Harrises, Barretts, and Rosses who were once Scharfstein, Horowitz, Bernstein, and Rosenberg or similar. I know a Wilson whose parents went through the camps and understandably concluded that Weinberger wasn’t a safe surname for their children. These examples could be multiplied many times.
Alas, Quote Investigator found no corroboration that “Foot Heads Arms Body” ever ran as a headline in the Times or any other newspaper.
Rats. Well, the Graun continues in its time-honored tradition; I wonder what the correction will look like…
i’m a little skeptical about “cutler” as an anglicization, since it’s the usual transliteration of a perfectly ordinary yiddish name: קאָטלער | kotler, as in yosl, who was “cutler” in english. that doesn’t preclude an earlier “kushner”, of course: “kotler/cutler” could have arrived as a way to have a second only or eldest son for conscription-evasion purposes (which is why my great-grandfather wasn’t an eisenberg, like his father and my argentinian cousins [aizenbergs, technically]), or for any number of other reasons.
everybody wants a forced-anglicization narrative instead of a voluntary-assimilation narrative about surnames, just like everyone loves a fleeing-pogroms narrative instead of a fleeing-shtetl-theocracy narrative about emigration – both are often fictional.
I got the “Kushner” from a FamilySearch family tree, which shows Ivor’s father Jacob (Jack, b. Łódź) and grandfather Moishe (b. Slutsk) as the first Cutlers, preceded by Dov Ber Kushner (b. Slutsk); and “Kussner” from Ivor’s obituary in the Independent, which also assigns the change to a Glasgow immigration official. Jack’s gravestone photo is nearly illegible but as far as I can tell the surname is spelled in Hebrew קוטלר. Moishe and his wife’s gravestones have the name spelled קוטלער.
@ AntC
What is this W. Ĺondon of which you speak?
@Bathrobe
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Hounslow, specifically TW3.
@rozele
I knew the name with the spelling Kotlar and thought it was a Czech name, not necessarily Jewish. But maybe these are two names.
Further to rozele’s point re alternative narratives for name-adjustment, it’s usually said that many of the Ashkenazim arriving in the U.S. in the late 19th century had surnames that were at most two generations old and initially adopted for the administrative convenience of Czarist bureaucrats. So the notion that these old-country surnames were deep tokens of identity that ought presumptively to have been preserved without modification but for oppressive assimilationist forces is maybe itself dubious. I suppose I might enjoy the mild exoticism I would be entitled to if my remote male-line ancestors had not shifted from “Brouwer” to Brewer approx three centuries ago, but I don’t think about it overmuch. (Although obviously an occupational surname with a transparent meaning and transparent English cognate is maybe the lowest-cost sort of shift?)
My family has gone from “Haversedge” to “Eddyshaw” with no bureaucratic oppression at any point*, simply through our own subliteracy and impenetrable dialect.
* Possibly a desire to throw the police off our trail, though. Does that count?
>Is that a reason to prevent people from voting in statewide elections, though?
I’m with you mostly. There are potential solutions to that issue.
What I’m saying is that the culture of lying keeps partisans so separate that it becomes difficult to reach what should be simple solutions that address everyone’s concerns. That at this point, the failure to reach such solutions isn’t yet leading to large-scale disenfranchisement nor to systems that enable large-scale vote fraud, but that the most vocal partisans on each side are leading their states in those directions.
I hope that short reply is in keeping with Hat’s advice.
It is, and I thank you!
@David Eddyshaw: The last time you told that story, the name was “Hithersay.” I’m not accusing you of lying; I’m just surprised the information has changed that much in just a few years.
@J.W. Brewer: I wouldn’t even have thought of a change on the scale of “Brouwer” to Brewer” as a name change at all. Obviously, everyone is entitled to their own feelings about such things. However, I don’t think I ever thought of “Altschul,” “Altshul,” “Altshuler,” etc. as different surnames, just variations of the same name.
@Brett: I guess the parallel would be if your granddad had gone with the Americanized spelling Oldschool. Which might be pretty cool, I suppose. Like the ethnic-German family in Alabama that turned Lautermilch into Loudermilk.
@Y: that all makes sense to me! kushner/kussner, and the alef vs vov and ayin vs nothing in kotler/kutler/kutlr/etc are ordinary kinds of variation. i wonder if the קוטלר version was generally written with nekudes?
I don’t think there’s niqqud there: here it is (you can click on the image for enlargement). His wife’s is much more readable.
Oh! That looks like they didn’t know that the other lauter, the widely obsolete one, means “pure”. (It survives in some places, those where it isn’t actually a homophone, as “lots of” or “lots of _ and nothing else”.)
Turns out the variant spelling “Lowdermilk” is also extant. As of the 1990 Census, the “u” version was the 7395th most common surname in the U.S. and the “w” version the 50696th, although it looks like more individuals with the “w” version have wikipedia articles about them. There’s also “Laudermilk,” which was 27470th most common but with no subjects of wikipedia articles.
This young man named Loudermilk has an improbable-and-thus-inspiring backstory as well as a nonstandard spelling of his first name (and he’s still playing in the NFL four seasons later). https://www.kansas.com/sports/varsity-kansas/varsity-football/article251524478.html
the other lauter, the widely obsolete one, means “pure”.
Besides the use mentioned by DM, it clings on in the literary register with the transferred meaning (“pure” of soul or character); its use for concrete items (liquids and bodies of water) is limited to poetical and archaizing language.
I know I’ve seen “blaggard” somewhere as a Scots pejoration; I did not realize until now that it was a variant of “blackguard”.
Never seen “bleggage” before, though.
I’m a bit surprised he didn’t drop in the italicized-Hebrew-with-English-in-parentheses “tefillin (phylacteries)”, (as he did with “chazan (cantor)”).
I note that WikiP has a page for Tefillin, and the page for Phylactery is in fact a disambiguation page.
Wikt for phylactery gives a ginormous etymology:
Huh. Wikt also says:
but does not link to tzitzit (which I’ve never heard of as being referred to as phylacteries).
Fulaks is nice. In Proto-Celtic fulach/pulach would be “bearded/hairy”. See eDil for Old Irish ulach:
https://dil.ie/43089.
What I want to know is what those pointless breves are doing in φῠλᾰκτήρῐον (they later magically vanish in φυλακτήρ).
Copied from some dictionary that wants to really reassure readers the vowels aren’t long – the letters are after all ambiguous even though the long versions are very rare. (Although… here’s a pretty basic word with a long ι.)
Ah yes, lautere Absichten “pure intentions”.
The breves are copied from Liddell/Scott, I guess.
@J.W. Brewer: “I recall being in Stornoway some three decades ago with my beloved late first wife where she was struck by the odd-feeling (to her*) possibility that she was at that moment the only Jew on the entire island of Harris/Lewis.”
I was living on Lewis in the spring/summer of 1992, so if that coincided with your visit, then she wasn’t alone. But I certainly shared her suspicion, and it was never disproven.
@Seonachan: I’m pretty sure this was summer of ’94, so … I guess still not disproven as to her?
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/2025/0829/yiddish-new-york-preservation-workers-circle
“The number of Yiddish speakers has declined dramatically since World War II. An annual camp in New York State is part of the effort to preserve it – engaging people who have spoken it for years, and a new generation that is just starting to learn.”
It’s good to see the Workers’ Circle promoting the language and culture. One thing about the article did strike me as odd. I suppose it was inevitable that the organization would standardize the orthography for its Yiddish name (“Der Arbeter Ring”), but for decades different chapters used different variations. The Chicago chapter, of which my great-grandfather was president for many years, usually (but not universally) used “Der Yiddishe Arbeterring.”