Mishegoss
Cidu Bill on Nov 20th 2008
According to Newsweek magazine, one of Hillary Clinton’s staffers told one of the magazine’s reporters during the primaries that everybody after a certain point everybody was “fed up with the Bill Clinton mishegoss.”
This word has always been a part of my personal vocabulary, but does the quote make any sense to most of Newsweek’s audience? I’ve noticed that New York City-based magazines and (to an even larger extent) Hollywood screenwriters seem convinced that the entire country is familair with Yiddish (which I suppose, if these magazines and screenwriters keep using it, might eventually be the case).
Filed in Bill Bickel, Bill Clinton, Newsweek, Yiddish, media, politics | 28 responses so far
Norm Nov 21st 2008 at 12:20 am 1
“does the quote make any sense to most of Newsweek’s audience?”
Not to this one, although I could probably make a decent guess, given the context.
Kit Nov 21st 2008 at 01:23 am 2
I had to Google it :p
solarrhino Nov 21st 2008 at 01:28 am 3
Messes? Ego? Mistresses? Self-importance (but maybe that’s just ego)? I couldn’t have guessed, so I had to look it up: “Crazy or senseless activity or behavior; craziness”, according to freedictionary.com.
Anyway, the occasional use of a unfamiliar word or phrase is, in my opinion, a small matter compared to the other assumptions made by those in politics or, as you say, popular culture who claim they represent “us” and our best interests.
Charlene Nov 21st 2008 at 04:25 am 4
I wouldn’t even guess. I would have assumed the typist sneezed.
Blinky the WOnder Wombat Nov 21st 2008 at 08:04 am 5
Mishegoss? Isn’t that the state just north of Indiana?
Miss Appropriate Nov 21st 2008 at 08:57 am 6
I’ve heard the word before, but never seen it written. But I have a curious amount of Yiddish in my daily vocabulary for a schiksa from the countryside of Pennsylvania. I never even knew how much until my friend’s husband (from Long Island, NY) pointed it out to me (I think it comes from my grandmother, who is my only ancestor who ever lived anywhere but a farm).
waferthinmint Nov 21st 2008 at 09:13 am 7
bill, quite honestly I find your question appalling. no writer should ever have to dumb down to the lowest common denominator of his audience. if vonegut chooses to use the word “yclept” he should do so without fear that his audience is too ignorant to understand. Groucho Marx once got a huge laugh when he defined the word “sans” while telling a story. (”I was sans mustache — that means ‘without’.”) the assumption that his audience would not understand was the joke. today it is the sad reality that we bridle at being forced to encounter new words. I use words like henotheism and crepuscular. why not use the best word no matter it’s origin. the yiddish population in the US was very influential on our modern culture and it is asinine at a Sarah Palin level to treat that part of our culture as un-american just because it is something foreign to one’s own experience. (Not that I really believe you did so.) To anyone who questions a word used on the Dick Van Dyke show and the Mary Tyler Moore show as being unfamiliar, I say “feh.”
Nicole Nov 21st 2008 at 09:57 am 8
Bill — I sort of agree with waferthinmint, but in a less strident way. The way I look at it is that in the course of reading you always come across words you don’t know. Often you can discern the meaning by context, and if not the exact meaning — close enough for government work (pun intended). In this case, I would think that most people could glean the meaning of the sentence without knowing exactly what “mishegoss’ means — and if they couldn’t then there is always Google and the dictionary.
waferthinmint Nov 21st 2008 at 10:13 am 9
i guess I was pretty strident; I thought you all could hear my smile.
Its Justme Nov 21st 2008 at 10:44 am 10
Nope, waferthinmint, I couldn’t hear your smile. I was about to defenestrate you.
Morris Keesan Nov 21st 2008 at 10:48 am 11
I had a conversation a year or two ago with an author, disagreeing with his use of “mishegas” in the foreword to one of his books. He defined it as something like “a mixture of various sorts of things”, and was unwilling to believe me when I opined that it didn’t mean what he thought it meant, because his Jewish wife agreed with his definition. I thought of referring him to Leo Rosten, but decided that it was probably futile.
Carolyn Nov 21st 2008 at 11:53 am 12
Charles Laquidara anyone??
jayjaybear Nov 21st 2008 at 12:37 pm 13
There are a LOT of Yiddishisms in the standard vocabulary, actually. Everyone knows what a schmuck is. Everyone’s heard of a schlemiel (and, if they were watching sitcoms in the 70s, have at least heard of a schlemozl). Even Opus has been up to his tuches in trouble (all the way back in Bloom County in the 80s).
Lisa Nov 21st 2008 at 02:27 pm 14
It’s easy to Google if you don’t understand the definition of a word. I’m on the side of not dumbing it down. Back in my day, we would have figured it out by context. And we LIKED it that way! Now get off my damned lawn.
Cidu Bill Nov 21st 2008 at 02:44 pm 15
I absolutely agree about not “dumbing down” one’s writing — but there’s a difference between using a less-common English word and using a word from a foreign language. The question here is how “foreign” mishegoss is. Some Yiddish has fallen into fairly common American usage. Some has not.
The writer also has the option of making sure the general meaning of the unusual word — whether English or foreign — can be figured out from context. I consider this simply good writing, because the goal is to communicate your thoughts to your entire audience: Use the precise word for the benefit of those who know it, but don’t do it in a way that shows disdain for those who don’t. I don’t think anybody should be expected to read Newsweek with a dictionary in hand.
Also makes a difference whether the word is being used to make an important point, or just part of a throwaway comment.
And of course the standards are different depending on the magazine: The New Yorker, whose readership is highly educated and very much Manhattan-based, should feel free to use as much Yiddish (and ten-dollar English words) as it wishes. The magazine I work for, which is national and blue-collar (or in many cases no-collar), I’d have to be meshuggah to use such language.
I’d also say that online writing should have a higher bar, because readers are a click away from defining any word.
You could make a case for calling any of these considerations “dumbing down,” but I think of it as working with one’s audience, since communication is a two-way street.
Even in normal conversation, many people adapt their speech to whoever they’re talking to: Many of us have friends — adult friends, not necessarily unintelligent — with whom we moderate our speech because we know they might not understand certain words we might use more freely when speaking to other friends. Perhaps on some level this is condescending; but then again using vocabulary they might not understand can seem condescending as well, so damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Elyrest Nov 21st 2008 at 02:55 pm 16
I knew the word, but I would have spelled it differently - meshugaas. I’m not surprised at all that someone would use it and assume that many people would understand the word. I’m originally a schiksa from rural Pennsylvania too, but I know quite a few Yiddish expressions.
Cidu Bill Nov 21st 2008 at 03:08 pm 17
My favorite story about the pervasiveness of Yiddish in New York: Some years back, in the Bronx, on a 95-degree afternoon, I was walking past an elderly black woman who was muttering “OY, is it hot!”
AR Nov 21st 2008 at 05:22 pm 18
Mishegoss is one I had to google–but then, I come from Wisconsin as opposed to New York, and my hometown didn’t have much of a Yiddish-speaking population. I think that if it was a quotation (as opposed to the Newsweek article writer’s actual writing), it might’ve been a decent idea for them to put the definition of the word in brackets behind it (”Bill Clinton mishegoss [madness/insanity/absurdity/whatever]”). Since it is one that’s understandable in context, though, I figure it’s fine that they didn’t.
furrykef Nov 21st 2008 at 05:43 pm 19
In response to waferthinmint:
bill, quite honestly I find your question appalling. no writer should ever have to dumb down to the lowest common denominator of his audience.
On the other side of the coin, “Never use a big word when a diminutive one would do.”
Smart writing is clear. It has nothing to do with how big or obscure the words are. It’s easy to write unclearly, and “mishegoss” is anything but clear to most people. It might not even be clear even after they look it up. If you can’t even find it in Merriam-Webster, you’re probably going too far, technical terms excepted.
I’m not saying words like “mishegoss” should be purged from the language. I’m saying that there are times when they are appropriate and times when they are not. The use of a term like “mishegoss” needs to be justified in some way — it needs to add something that simpler words could not — and “it’s advanced vocabulary” or “people should use dictionaries more often” are not good reasons.
- Kef
Craig Nov 21st 2008 at 05:50 pm 20
I’ve always used it as meshuga or meshugana.
Yes I’m Jewish and grew up hearing and speaking (to some extent) Yiddish.
Nicole Nov 21st 2008 at 06:00 pm 21
Over the last few years the word kerfuffle has creeped into the common usage, so much so that I recently heard it used on a news show.
The point is that they only way for a word to become common is for people to use it. In this case I would have to say the the sense of, if not the exact meaning of mishegoss is fairly clear by context.
Spelling is another matter — I have no idea of mishegoss is the correct way to spell the word ore not, and certainly that would be important for looking it up.
Lola Nov 21st 2008 at 06:05 pm 22
Craig,
I’ve always understood it to be two different words/meanings.
Meshugana is a person as in goofball or lunatic
Mishegoss is a situation as in craziness or sill chaos
Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time I was off in left field.
Cidu Bill Nov 21st 2008 at 06:05 pm 23
Yiddish is most correctly written using Hebrew letters, so transliteration is often iffy. It’s been said that there are 8 ways to spell Chanukah, and they’re all incorrect.
On the other hand, you can probably Google almost any spelling of a Yiddish word and find some entries.
Lola Nov 21st 2008 at 06:06 pm 24
uh, “silly” chaos
so was that a case of Fraudian slop?
Cidu Bill Nov 21st 2008 at 08:10 pm 25
Lola, you pretty much nailed it. Definitely two different words.
And meshugah is an adjective, referring to a person being nuts.
No doubt dealing with Bill Clinton’s mishegoss was enough to make the staffers meshugah.
Charlene Nov 21st 2008 at 09:25 pm 26
“Some Yiddish has fallen into fairly common American usage. Some has not.”
This is a good point for this instance. This was an American talking about American domestic policy; of course it’s going to be in American English.
padraig Nov 24th 2008 at 11:08 am 27
Bill, bear in mind that Yiddish is NOT Hebrew. Most Yiddish expressions are actually from German roots, and have been described to me by Jewish folks (which includes my mother-in-law, btw) as “German with a thick Hebrew accent.” We hear a lot of it in the USA presumably because of the presence of a lot of German Jewish folks who over the course of the 20th century realized emigrating to the US was a good survival strategy.
You want to see a strange look on someone’s face, use a Yiddish expression on an Israeli.
Prosfilaes Nov 24th 2008 at 09:07 pm 28
padraig, it’s still true that the standard orthography for Yiddish is Hebrew, and there is no universally agreed-upon transliteration in Latin characters.
waferthinmint, the goal of most writers is to get your audience to hand over their cash, or at least their attention. You can use whatever words you want–you can write it completely in Old English or Yiddish if you want–but don’t expect your audience, or your editor who wants his cut, to be amused. Isaac Asimov, about as intelligent a person as you could hope for your audience, wrote once about reading no further the instant he hit the word “veridical” in a story, as a good author would have just written “true”. Gratuitous use of rare words where common words could work doesn’t make your writing better.