Others taking to that stage during the festival include for the first time comedy actor and regular panellist on BBC Radio 4's I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, Tim Brooke Taylor (tomorow, September 30); professional tennis coach and perhaps the sport's most well-known mum - Judy Murray - tells the story of her life bringing up two champions on October 3; former Children's Laureate Michael Rosen visits with So They Call You
Pisher!, his own life story (October 2).
Yiddish of course gave Hebrew a full and familiar range of colorful words: chutzpah, dreck, luksh, nebech, nudnik,
pisher, pupik, putz, shlumper, shmegege, shmendrik, shmuck, shnorer, shvitzer, and also broch (imbroglio, dilemma), foyleshtik (monkey business), greps, gurnisht, kuntz, macher, mishmash, pulke, pitchifkes, shmuntzes, plonter (predicament), pekelach, shvung (momentum), shluk (sip, but more like a slurp or pull, as the sound of the word suggests), shmates, shpitz, shpritz, tzutzik (smallfry) and tussik or tuches, the latter apparently from the Hebrew tachat (bottom), showing how, via Yiddish, Hebrew words may reenter the spoken language through the back door, so to speak.
Remember "Call me Ishmael" or, for that matter, "Call me
Pisher?" Remember Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali?
"Every Jew in this camp will be on your head, if you don't change the way you act, you little
pisher, you putz." He turned to the guards, as he pulled Hunger out of the storeroom, into the night air.
She grinned at his astonishment, impish Gussie, who also blushed, then heaved a sigh over the ineffectual husband he would make--a
pisher who stole kisses from ladies in extremity.
(5) Watson acknowledged that something along those lines might have occurred, but his thesis was that the triggering event came much earlier in Yale's life, when he was but a
pisher. "I think," Watson asseverated, drawing upon his cutting-edge research at the Institute, "that it goes back to Yale's bris, when his petseleh suffered at the hands of a mohel who was a bit of a shlemiel, leaving him with a shlecht shlang, that is, a plotzed putz, or, if you will, a shvachkeit in his shvantz." (Well, maybe so, (6) but I must say that I always thought Watson was himself a certifiable meshugerner.)
Call me
pisher, but I think it's important for, dare I say it, America to know that there is one gay, albeit strange-looking, individual who is comfortable enough to talk about sex the way straight people do.
Except for Gore Vidal, I don't know of another novelist who is doing this job, an enormously important one in an age when a sense of the past weakens and falls in value from year to year, so that the new is thought to reside in a trendy
pisher culture (to use a precise Yiddish term).
The Yiddish-speaking Brooklyn childhoods of figures like Daniel Bell, Alfred Kazin, and Sidney Hook fill his first chapter; a memorable quote from Irving Howe on how everyone started out as "a talkative little
pisher' bluffing through street-corner political arguments resonates through the book, even as the arguments become extremely abstruse.
It had baked in the sun, acquiring the permanence of the brilliant tattoos that snaked up and down the legs of those
pishers. ANARCHY.