Saturday, October 25, 2003
Hooray for Yiddish
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.
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