the world

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:16 PM -0400 10/4/04, James A. Landau wrote:
>In a message dated  Wed, 29 Sep 2004 15:38:58 -0400l  Laurence Horn
><laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> quotes and writes:
>
>>   >Among adherents of several (generally conservative, in my observation)
>>   >religions, the phrase "the world" is often used to mean something like
>>   >"those who aren't part of our particular belief system", with a
>connotation
>>   >of "those sinners over there".
>>   >
>>   cf. also "gentile", or "goy"
>
>Both "Gentile" (from Latin gens) and Hebrew "goyim" mean "the nations",
>apparently short for "the nations of the earth" or "the [other] nations of the
>earth."


Yes, that was what I intended--the "otherness" coming in (originally)
by implicature, as it does with "the world" taken as "not-us".

Of course, under certain circumstances, gentiles/goys may be used in
a way so as to exclude others who have more specific designations, as
a garden-variety instance of the blocking phenomenon.  (I'd argue
that this is a pragmatic narrowing and that technically if x is a
non-Jew, x is a gentile/goy.)  Here's one informant judgment, for
example, from a while back (Ellen Prince, p.c., 2/22/92); other
usages may differ.

"In fact _goy_ is used only for white christians, and only germanic
or slavic or celtic ones at that. like an italian is a italyener, a
black is a shvartser, a chinese is a khinezer, an indian (either
kind) is an indianer, an arab is an araber, a gypsy is
a tsigayner, etc. (i even saw a story once about a yid, a goy, un a tsigayner.)
to call one of these a goy would be very misleading. goy is, i believe, the
kind of goy you hid from, in eastern europe or on the lower east side (back
around 1920)."

--Larry, just now reminded by the story about a yid, a goy, un a
tsigayner of the opening of the old Aaron Spelling TV show The Mod
Squad, which introduced us to three young undercover officers who had
been turned after being busted by the police--"One was white.  One
was black.  One was blonde."