Dave Wilton’s wordorigins.org notes two Yiddish words with first citations from 1937 in the Oxford English Dictionary: bupkes, meaning nothing, and zaftig, also spelled zoftig, meaning big, plump, soft, or juicy. Bupkes may originally have referred...
The Yiddish word bupkis means nothing, and speakers sometimes split its syllables apart to exaggerate how empty that is. One example from an email in Denton, Texas: “Not only did the government shut down, but the employees are collecting bup and kis...
