Hooligan Hawks

schnook, schnorrer, megillah, meshuga, schlump…

Who can resist such words? I plan on working at least one of these into my conversation today.

I’ve copied from last week’s Wordsmith.org emails.

A language is the soul of its people. This is nowhere illustrated more profoundly than in the Yiddish language, the language of Jews of eastern and central Europe and their descendants. A tongue full of wit and charm, Yiddish embodies deep appreciation of human behavior in all its colorful manifestations. The word Yiddish comes from German Judisch meaning Jewish. But it is not the same as Hebrew, even though it is written in Hebrew script…

…Many of the everyday English language words such as bagel, klutz, and kibitz are terms from Yiddish. This week we’ll look at a few other Yiddishisms that have enriched the English language.

schnook (shnook) noun

A stupid, easily deceived person.

[From Yiddish shnuk (snout) or from German schnucke (a small sheep).]

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)

“A gun-toting schnook became an embarrassing crook when he robbed
  a Spokane dollar store Sunday. Seriously, if you’re going to commit
  a Class A felony, you might as well rob a Class A joint.”
  Frank Sennett; Dollar-Store Thief Bucks Common Sense; Spokesman Review
  (Washington); Mar 9, 2007.

schnorrer (SHNOR-uhr) noun

One who habitually takes advantage of others’ generosity,
  often through an air of entitlement.

[From Yiddish, from German schnurren (to purr, hum, or whir), from the sound of a beggar’s musical instrument.]

megillah (meh-GIL-uh) noun

A long, tedious account.

[From Yiddish megile (scroll), from Hebrew megillah, from galal (to roll).
The term alludes to the length of the text in the Book of Esther which is read in its entirety, twice, during Purim, a Jewish festival.]

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)

“But the obvious challenge was to go through the whole megillah — to
  begin with the Andante in C Major, which Mozart wrote when he was five,
  and proceed to the bitter end, the Requiem.”
  Alex Ross; The Storm of Style; The New Yorker; Jul 24, 2006

meshuga or meshugga (muh-SHOOG-uh) adjective

Crazy; stupid.

[From Yiddish meshuge, from Hebrew meshugga.]

Today’s word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=meshuga

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)

“Plenty of hip-hoppers want to be considered insane, but only Paul Barman
  wants to be known as meshuga.”
  David Segal; The Weirder, the Better; The Washington Post; Jun 25, 2000.

schlump (shlump) noun

A dull or slovenly person.

[From Yiddish shlumperdik (unkempt, sloppy).]

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)

“‘You don’t want to dress up too much, but you don’t want to be
  a schlump,’ says Michael Kors.”
  Hal Rubenstein; Terrific Style by Age, by Size, by Shape, by Color;
  In Style (New York); Aug 2006.

This geeked me out today.

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

Can you imagine that game world? Can you imagine a world that’s an actual world? Where adventurers set out to find fortune and encounter all sorts of nasties being played by hundreds of thousands of other people around the globe?

Dude.

More here.

Zing, Baby!

“Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.”  –Socrates

I just had the most uncanny, coolest experience. It’s 6 PM. I’m out on a walk along a road that runs by a swampy river called Birch Creek to a fork in the road. The sky is this glorious blue with brilliant white and gray clouds. I stop and pick some ripe black currents off a little spindly bush growing down off the shoulder in the rocks and continue on.

I take the left fork, south along the hill and enjoy the sight of the mown fields, a scattering of green ton bales standing on the short meadow grass, and the storm clouds gathering over the hills to the west.

A few rabbits spook and run across the road. I reach the mile mark and turn back. I’d already done 30 minutes worth of shred before the walk and needed to get back to practice basketball with my oldest. The whole time I’m listening to Lois McMaster Bujold’s HALLOWED HUNT read by Marguerite Gavin. It’s warm, sunny, lovely. The story is good.

I come back by the fork and hear this sound over the audio. It’s like a single prop airplane in the distance. I continue on another hundred yards. That distant, thin drone grows, but I can’t figure out what it is, so I put the audio book on hold and take off the ear phones.

The air is perfectly still. That muggy stillness that precedes a storm. But all around me is this sound. This thin drone, filling up road. It’s coming from all sides.

Insects?

I look down off the side of the road at the sloughs and cattails and willows and see nothing. I look back up. Look around. And then I notice a small black body speed past. And another. And another.

Flies? It can’t be flies. When have you ever seen a fly pursue a straight line?

Three more. Half a dozen. Another, another, and they’re everywhere. But they’re not flying thickly. Not mobbing. Not massed in some cartoon clump. They’re all spread out. I strain to see them in this odd light.

Bees. They’re dark. Almost black in their flight, but it has to be bees!

And they’re all around, thirty feet to either side of me. Zooming past. There, there, and there. It’s like dozens and dozens of refugees in flight with single purpose. There’s no looping around. No dalliance. No crazy panic. They’re serious, focused. All of them going the same way. Straight ahead on some urgent goal.

There’s a big fat blue dragonfly in the willows that keeps zipping after individual bees as they fly past, trying to get a meal, but each time, just at the moment when it would attack, it spooks and darts back for cover. Dragonflies are voracious buggers. But these aren’t single bees. It must be thinking the other bees are coming for it. Still it can’t resist and darts out again.

And all around is the humming. It grows. The bees directly in front of me see me as they approach and make course corrections. I keep walking. A half a mile and the thin droning still surrounds me. The bees keep coming, but they’re thinning.

Thunder cracks behind me. The wind begins to pick up. The sky behind me is darkening.

The sound of the drone grows thinner, is almost gone. But there are bees still out there, following. I can hear them. See them. Individuals trailing the others, flying past me toward the storm that’s still about a mile off. And I think they’re too far behind.

Maybe their hive was wrecked. Maybe it’s just time to swarm and there’s a queen up front leading them. And somehow her scent is on the wind. Somehow they know to follow.

I don’t know if they’ll find a new place. They’re going to have to cross a mile of mown meadow before they get to anything that might serve as any type of shelter. I don’t know if the wind will ground them, or the main group will find safety but the stragglers will be blown to their deaths. All I know is that I’m sitting here in awe, electric with life.