When is a Knish Not A Knish

[Katharine The Grate]

Well, you made me want to read the book.

Katharine "do you pronounce the K?" Grate



>
> I'm reading a fascinating book (Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth)
> published in 1934 but set two-plus decades earlier in NYC.
> It provides a revealing portrait of Jewish immigrants' early
> experiences in what was, for them, a pretty harsh 'new world'.
>   The lengthy Forward points to an incident that comes up fairly
> early in the book, when a rather precocious 10-year old female
> tries to lure a younger boy to "touch [my] knish."
>   Aside from a momentary revival in The Vagina Monologues, this
> Yiddish term for "down there," another euphemism cited in TVM,
> seems to have pretty much been ignored by contributors to Google's
> vast storehouse of hit sources.
>   Much the same can be said, I'm sure, of many (many!) other
> Yiddish terms, particularly such 'taboo' ones as knish, when used
> this way (as per YiddishLibrary.com, among others) and more's the
> pity, I say.
>   And I say all this apropos of absolutely nothing.
> dh
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------

Really, who cares about happy gay people getting married when it costs 4
bucks a gallon to get to Wal-Mart? Priorities, people.
Mark Morford
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/05/16/notes051608.DTL&nl=fix

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