Schikseh

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:52 PM -0400 8/1/02, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>--------------------------------------------
>SCHIKSEH
>
>    From THE AMERICAN HEBREW, 28 November 1890, pg. 88, col. 2:
>
>    As misfortunes never come singly, it happened that the Schikseh (A
>Christian girl who is engaged by several households to attend to the fire
>during the Sabbath), was away on her rounds.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Does anyone know if this specific sense was the original one?  I
always thought ANY Christian (or gentile) girl/woman counted as a
shiksa (the way I've usually seen it spelled), and that this was
simply the female counterpart of (the less frequently encountered)
"shaygets".  The context it's usually used in is as a potential
date/partner of a Jewish man ("...and now a SHIKSA he brings home to
me yet!"  [goes off to stick head in oven]), but I assumed that was
purely contextual--the woman in question would be a shiksa whether or
not the guy brought her home to meet his mother.  Or whether or not
she had been engaged to attend the fire.

Larry