What drink-type's name means "a
spray" in Yiddish?
Etymology, Etymology, and more Etymology
as well as grammar, usage, euphemism, slang, jargon, semantics, linguistics, neologism, idiom, cant, and argot.
The critically-acclaimed board game
MooT
consists of tough questions about the nuances of the English language.
Answer:
the spritzer
The word spritzer derives from the German/Yiddish
spritz, spray. It denotes a drink composed of
wine and soda water.
Feedback
It's a hard
question, is an English word Yiddish or German? Yiddish is essentially a group
of German dialects, with some distinctive vocabulary. If one knows that a word
entered English directly from general German with no Yiddish intermediary, then
it is clearly German.
And if it is a word that is common
in Yiddish but not German (or wasn't common in German when it came into
English), then it is Yiddish. But if it is a word shared by Yiddish and German,
and the word is known to have come into English via people who spoke Yiddish,
is it then a Yiddish or German word?
In a sense, Yiddish
and modern German are dialects of a more recent Germanic language, and English
(while being so different as to be called another language) is also of the
Germanic family. Who owns a word that is shared by all three?
Steve White
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Steve: Don't worry, buddy! Vocabulary isn't like land:
English-, German-, and Yiddish-speakers can all rightfully claim ownership of
"spritzer" without coming to blows.
jacko at lycos.com
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I always thought it was German. We use this exact same word in the
former Yugoslavia--I'm from bosnia. Quite a few german loanwords there, but no
yiddish ones as far as I know. O wait, maybe it came into American English via
immigrant Yiddish speakers, but into the Balkans via German speakers.
subatomiczoo at gmail.com
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Isn't it actually derived from
German?
[Mootguy: Yes, it is. I was
wrong. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word derives from
German.]
alejandro.rodriguez.1975 at gmail.com
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