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.

You want to see a strange look on someone’s face, use a Yiddish expression on an Israeli.

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.

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.

so was that a case of Fraudian slop?

On the other hand, you can probably Google almost any spelling of a Yiddish word and find some entries.

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.

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.

Yes I’m Jewish and grew up hearing and speaking (to some extent) Yiddish.

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