[Ads-l] Snowclone: Can a (derog) X get a Y?

[Laurence Horn]

> On Apr 18, 2015, at 4:05 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 2:01 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
> wrote:
> 
>> Well, not officially, although it has been viewed as a quasi-epithet in =
>> need of euphemistic cover in some contexts, as Bolinger and others have =
>> noted: "he's a Jew" tends to be replaced by "he's Jewish" (which
>> inevitably brings up the classic Jonathan Miller line, "I'm not a Jew,
>> I'm Jew-ish--I don't go the whole hog.")  But what's interesting to me
>> about the parallel between "Can a Jew get a table bib?" and  "Can a
>> nigger get a table dance?" is the use of "yid" in Yiddish in very much
>> the same way some black speakers use "nigger", to mean something very
>> much like 'guy (presupposed to be in the relevant ethnic group)'.  There
>> are countless jokes that start out with something akin to "So a yid
>> walks into a bar...", modulo the cultural adjustments.  And needless to
>> say "yid" is hardly anodyne when used by those outside the in-group,
>> even if it doesn't rise to the level of being "the y-word".  So maybe
>> there's a remnant of "a yid" in these occurrences of "a Jew" to refer to
>> oneself, more "a guy [+Jewish]" than foreground the religion or ethnic
>> identity.
>> 
>> LH, hoping no apologies are needed...
>> 
> 
> I first came across this use of "yid" in Philip Roth's 1934 novel, _None
> Call It Sleep_.


Thanks, Wilson. This (below) is exactly what I had in mind, put better than I did.  On the other hand, your reference above is a bit...well, let's just say blended.  _Call It Sleep_ was a 1934 novel by Henry Roth, no relation to Philip, who was an infant at the time and not yet writing even short stories.  The title you provide, _None Call It Sleep_ is, if I'm not mistaken, a blend of the Henry Roth title and the 1964 anti-Communist tome _None Dare Call It Treason_.  Seamlessly blended, though!

LH



> Not yet having been born in '34, it was ca. 1963, when I
> read it. At the time, I was immediately struck by the parallel between
> Roth's characters' use of "yid" and the ordinary use in BE of "nigger" to
> mean, "any regular dude not needing a specific ID for this anecdote to
> work/for this reference to be understood." But this interpretation was
> colored <har! har!> by my thinking that "yid" was only an insult. Later, it
> occurred to me that "yid" used among yidn is no more *necessarily* an
> insult than "nigger" used among niggers is, abstracting away from the push
> by black comedians, beginning with Dave Chapelle, IME, to expand the use of
> "nigger" as "guy" to include *any* male person, irrespective of race,
> creed, color, nationality, or previous condition of servitude.
> 
> Nobody bothered to check this out, re "nigger," I reckon:
> 
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.youtube.com_watch-3Fv-3DgLZA32oHbC4&d=AwIBaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=wFp3X4Mu39hB2bf13gtz0ZpW1TsSxPIWYiZRsMFFaLQ&m=2JXWRMGgYT1pNs6WnPh5iRSHDBpRhJMOkr-NkH3Q75Y&s=_Vm9i3-gtj2beaAFM4oO4e8Pbzx3ZvBLFVyz4Xryj8Q&e= 
> 
> As for "Jew" being an insult, I've seen it so used in print since forever
> and heard it so used in reality since ca. 1965 - the storekeeper was, in
> fact, of Armenian ancestry. A friend gave me "the talk" back in '74. And
> it's been done on the Comedy Channel - "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia"?
> - and, subsequently, discussed in these very pages.
> 
> -- 
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
> 
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