Knock Me A Teakettle

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, hi, this is Scott calling from La Jolla, California.

Hi, Scott, welcome to the show.

Hi, Scott, what can we do for you?

I had a question that my family, this is going back when I was a child, and our grandmom and my aunts used to say a word, hockin’ me a chinik, or hock me a chinik, or stop hocking me a chinik, or something like that. I was curious as to the derivation of that word. What did it mean? What kind of shenanigans were you up to when they said it?

Yeah, I’m not sure. I think we were probably roughhousing and asking a lot of questions or doing some fun things like that. It would normally come, perhaps we were maybe somewhat bothersome, if that’s possible. Loud, maybe. Noisy?

Yeah, perhaps, yes.

And what’s your family’s country of origin?

Eastern European, primarily Russian and Polish.

Primarily Russian and Polish.

And Yiddish speakers, perhaps?

There was some Yiddish speaking in the house, absolutely.

-huh. -huh.

And the reason we’re asking about this is that, yes, this is a Yiddish expression. It’s usually hakmirniken chynik or something like that, right?

Right. The chynik is in there almost always. There’s a lot of varieties.

Yeah.

I butchered the word then.

Well, I did too just now. But the bottom line is that it’s a Yiddish expression that basically means don’t knock me a tea kettle. Stop banging on that tea kettle. And it’s interesting that you mentioned Russian because you hear the Russian word for tea in there, chai.

Fantastic.

It’s like asking somebody to stop making a ruckus. Because, you know, if you’re banging on a tea kettle with a spoon or something like that, it’s going to be noisy.

So I guess he means, you know, like quit bothering me or?

Yeah, yeah, quit bothering me. Quit making the noise?

Yeah, quit making the noise, quit being so annoying.

Yeah.

Now I understand it very well.

Well, good. When was that first used?

When was that first used?

I’m betting it’s really old.

Well, I don’t know about biblical times, but it certainly—I don’t think they had tea kettles in it. It predates the modern age as far as we can tell. It shows up in a lot of Yiddish dictionaries and joke books with Yiddishisms in them and that sort of thing. But the Three Stooges used it in one of their skits.

That’s true, yes.

So at least back to the Three Stooges.

Fantastic.

Thanks so much for your call, Scott. We really appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

I see in my Yiddish books that there’s a variety of different connotations. And one that I like is you could say that somebody is banging on a tea kettle, but you mean that they’re just talking nonstop, that you can’t get a word in edgewise, or that they have a lot of useless chatter. And some people think that’s about the tea kettle boiling and the noise that the tea kettle makes. Sounds a little bit like somebody just nonstop talking and not quitting.

Interesting, with the lid sort of rattling a little bit.

Yeah, so people—

So they’re hocking, huh?

So people think that there’s a variety of different mental images that people get with this expression.

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