"yeah, yeah" again (another version)

[Laurence Horn]

On Jul 21, 2012, at 12:25 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> Garson O'Toole wrote, quoting from an MIT Press book:
>> the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, shout from the back of the room
>> in rich Yiddish: "Yeah, yeah?"
>
> What is the rich Yiddish?  I want to employ it when appropriate, with
> varying intonations as appropriate.
>
Well, in the possible (but not actual world) in which Chomsky spoke at some (possible but not actual) talk about double negation at Columbia (extremely unlikely), Morgenbesser's putative comeback was, I think, supposed to be in rich Yiddish-inflected English rather than Yiddish, but youneverknow.  I'm not sure what the Yinglish is for "Yeah, yeah"; maybe it just comes out in the inflection and the eyebrows.  Probably similar to the rich Yiddish-inflected Danish that Morgenbesser used when Otto Jespersen was talking about double negation at a public lecture sometime in the 1930s.

LH

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