Is there a ‘Gut Check’ in Yiddish?
by Ben Atlas on 10.30.2011.9:44am · 0 comments
There is an expression in yiddish “booych svore” a “stomach explanation” used to underline a complete nonsense, some personal expression not based in “facts”. Perhaps parallel to the crude american expression of a “mental fart”, when brain misfires and one looses control of his faculties.
Interestingly in every other language, that I know, the meaning is reversed. “Gut check” in English and “listening to your gut” means to bypass the unreliable head and react on a visceral, personal level. Similarly in Russian “chuvstvuyu v’pechonkach”, literally “feel it in my liver”, means the ultimate truth test.
The Yiddish phrase is only expression of the prevailing Judaic culture, where any unquoted knowledge, that doesn’t come from the head, any personal expression, is looked upon with derision. The question then is why, despite this stifling tradition, the Jews produced many creative geniuses? The reason I think is in the question I asked about Zizek. Why don’t we see more Zizeks in the West, while we had plenty of them in the totalitarian East? Paradoxically a mental prison simply encourages the opposite. People think that the Jewish geniuses are the result of the Jewish culture, perhaps as much as the dissidents are the result of the communist culture it is true. I know this in my gut.
Tagged as:
etymology,
language,
philosophy,
russian jews,
yiddish
Is there a ‘Gut Check’ in Yiddish?
by Ben Atlas on 10.30.2011.9:44am · 0 comments
There is an expression in yiddish “booych svore” a “stomach explanation” used to underline a complete nonsense, some personal expression not based in “facts”. Perhaps parallel to the crude american expression of a “mental fart”, when brain misfires and one looses control of his faculties.
Interestingly in every other language, that I know, the meaning is reversed. “Gut check” in English and “listening to your gut” means to bypass the unreliable head and react on a visceral, personal level. Similarly in Russian “chuvstvuyu v’pechonkach”, literally “feel it in my liver”, means the ultimate truth test.
The Yiddish phrase is only expression of the prevailing Judaic culture, where any unquoted knowledge, that doesn’t come from the head, any personal expression, is looked upon with derision. The question then is why, despite this stifling tradition, the Jews produced many creative geniuses? The reason I think is in the question I asked about Zizek. Why don’t we see more Zizeks in the West, while we had plenty of them in the totalitarian East? Paradoxically a mental prison simply encourages the opposite. People think that the Jewish geniuses are the result of the Jewish culture, perhaps as much as the dissidents are the result of the communist culture it is true. I know this in my gut.
Tagged as: etymology, language, philosophy, russian jews, yiddish