"yeah, yeah" again (another version)

[Jonathan Lighter]

Where's the Yiddish inflection in "Yeah, yeah"?

JL

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "yeah, yeah" again (another version)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org