Careful with That Teakettle! (minicast)

Welcome to another summer minicast of A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

We’re on our regular summer hiatus, but you think that’s going to stop us from talking? No way.

In fact, here’s a call we couldn’t wait to share with you.

Hi, this is Chris Marix calling from San Diego, California.

Well, hello Chris in San Diego. What’s cooking in San Diego?

Well, the weather is certainly beautiful, and we’re cooking a little because it’s nice and warm out today.

Yeah, yeah. What else is new?

Right, exactly.

So I was raised in New Jersey, although I live out here now.

And when I was a kid, I spent an awful lot of time with a local family, the parents and siblings of a good friend of mine who were Jewish people.

And they were Reform Jews living in New Jersey, and they used a lot of Yiddish expressions.

And I’m not Jewish from my family.

And one of the expressions I use all the time was haqmi and chynik.

And we heard it a lot, and I picked up a lot of Yiddishisms from them, from being around them so much.

And I always wondered, and they did too, actually, what exactly does that mean?

I mean, we knew what it meant contextually.

When Mrs. Steinberg said to me, you know, oh, haqmi and chynik already, it meant, you know, you’re driving me crazy, leave me alone.

But literally, we never knew what it really meant.

Do you have any guesses at all of what it might have meant?

Well, you know, I’ve asked a lot of people this question, a lot of Jewish folks who actually have the same experience I have.

They all know the expression, but they don’t know what it means.

And some people, just the other day at my office, a woman said she thought it meant, like, hock is a reference to hawking your wares or hocking your wares, and in China it gives to China.

So it’s like you’re kind of driving me nuts so much that I’m, you know, you’re driving me nuts to China, so to speak.

Like, that’s how far you’re driving me crazy.

Well.

But I don’t know how true that is.

Who knows?

Not really, no.

I didn’t think it would be.

It’s a good guess.

Bonus points for trying, but not really, no.

The reason that we know this expression is because it’s treated in almost all the books that I have about Yiddish.

It’s very well known in all the different dialects of Yiddish that have shown up in the United States.

But probably the reason that you didn’t find it, Chris, is because transliterating from the Yiddish characters, which are very similar to Hebrew, into English means there’s a lot of room for variation.

So it’s hard to Google this because you’re not quite sure how to transliterate.

Right, exactly. That’s exactly what I’ve done.

Yeah, exactly.

So there are a variety of spellings, and I’m not going to spell them here, but the full form of the phrase is I know it.

And pardon me, Yiddish speakers, because I didn’t grow up with the language either.

But the best that I can do is, so there’s extra words in there.

There are, yeah.

You might also say, so what you find is, you’ve hit on something really interesting here, Chris.

People know the expression because they learned it from their parents and grandparents.

And so maybe they don’t have a full mastery of Yiddish.

So they remember the phrase, and as you say, they know the context and they know what it means, but they don’t know actually what it means in the original language.

So they’re going to corrupt it a little bit as they use it.

They’re going to drop words or syllables, and it’s going to be kind of transformed over time, become its own thing.

I guess that’s a lot of these Yiddish expressions, too.

Sure.

It happens in English, too.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

It happens in every language, pretty much, that’s spoken for any great length of time.

What’s really cool about this one is that now that we know what it’s from, we know that it’s a Yiddish phrase, and we know the original Yiddish, we know that it means, get this, don’t knock me a teapot.

Oh, so China is a reference to, I guess, Chinik is China.

No, that’s a coincidence.

The word that you’re talking about that sounds like China is spelled in the transliteration that I use, T-S-H-A-Y-N-I-K.

So it doesn’t even look anything like China.

Isn’t that funny?

But that’s the literal translation.

What it means is don’t bang on a tea kettle or don’t harangue me.

Stop nagging me or stop annoying me or pestering me.

Stop nagging me already, yes.

Right.

I didn’t know from your nagging.

Yeah.

If somebody was banging on a tea kettle with a cup or spoon, right, a metal tea kettle, it’s really annoying.

It’s very frustrating.

Isn’t that funny?

That’s great.

So it’s a very well-known expression.

I love it.

It’s so colorful because it just brings the idea.

This is why Yiddish is so successful in bringing words in English, because it’s got some color and some life and vitality to it.

Oh, and it’s just plain fun.

It’s really a fun language.

Yeah.

It’s fun.

But interestingly, in the third or second generations, the verb tohok, which is the one that kind of means knock, more or less, in Yiddish, and actually I think there’s a similar verb in German, has come to mean, because of this expression, to annoy somebody with a lot of excessive talk.

Sure, true. You could say, don’t hock me.

That’s right.

Oh, really? I’ve never heard this.

And somebody who’s kind of like a very aggressive go-getter, this is the kind of guy who’s got like two cell phones, and he’s got a pocket full of business cards, and he’s always trying to do a deal, and he fancies himself an entrepreneur.

He’s called a hocker.

Right, right.

He’s a guy who never shuts up.

He’s always talking about his own business, right?

Yeah, and I’ve heard people say, oh, he thinks he’s a hocker, but he’s really a nebbish.

There we go.

Bingo.

Exactly right.

Well, I’ll be.

So thank you, Chris.

This is a brilliant – your detective work brought you here, and here’s your answer.

How’s that?

Thank you very much.

You know, it’s been kind of a lifelong question mark in my brain.

Thank you guys for having the show, too, because it was on the show a couple weeks ago that I thought of calling you about this.

Excellent.

Yeah, you know, you should always call when you have these questions.

We’re always open.

Door’s always open.

We read everything.

Listen to everything.

Right.

You can knock our tea kettle anytime.

That’s right.

Thank you.

Thanks very much for that.

All right.

Super duper.

Take care, Chris.

You too.

Thanks.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, we do love those lifelong question marks.

In fact, we’d love to hear about any kind of punctuation that’s rattling around in your brain.

Question marks, exclamation points, maybe some ellipses.

Email your questions and comments to words@waywordradio.org.

Or call us anytime to leave a message.

The number is 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD.

And if you just can’t wait to chat about some aspect of language, your favorite Yiddishism perhaps, drop by our discussion forum.

That’s at waywordradio.org/discussion.

And one more thing.

If you want to know more about this marvelous Yiddish expression, hachmier nisht kinshainik, check out a book by Michael Wex.

It’s called Born to Kvetch, and it’s one of my favorites.

In it, Michael offers some surprising insights into this phrase, among other things, he explains how it was popularized by the Three Stooges.

To read an excerpt from Born to Kvetch, go to our website.

The address is waywordradio.org.

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For A Way with Words, I’m Martha Barnette. I’ve read it yet.

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