Of Noodge and Nudge, of Slob and Schlub

Recently, while thinking about two words that have gone from Yiddish to American Jewish English, and from American Jewish English to general American English, I was struck by something they had in common.

The first word is “nudge,” “noodge,” or “nudzh” (one finds all three spellings, pronounced with a vowel like the “u” in “push”), which as a verb means to bother or pester someone, and as a noun means a nuisance or a pest. These come from Yiddish nudyen, to bore, as does Yiddish/Yinglish “nudnik,” a bore or obsessive talker. All go back to Polish nuda, boredom, and to related Polish words like nudnieć, to bore, and (yes, the Poles have them, too) nudnik. And, in Israeli Hebrew, we have the verb l’nadned, to pester, formed by joining the meaning of nudyen to a sound-alike, preexistent Hebrew verb meaning to shake. The two are distinguished by the preposition they take: l’nadned oto—“to shake him”; l’nadned lo—“to pester him.”

What made me think of “noodge” (this is the spelling I’ll use here) was a letter written to the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz by Maya Bar-Hillel, a well-known Israeli behavioral psychologist. Bar-Hillel was commenting on an article in the paper that referred to “Nudge Theory”—which, for the uninitiated, is an approach to public policy expounded by the legal scholar Cass Sunstein and the economist Richard Thaler in their 2008 book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Arguing there for a “liberal paternalism” based on “nudges,” Sunstein and Thaler define these as any governmental or institutional intervention that “alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding [other] options.” Nudges are never coercive, as would be, say, banning the sale of junk food. By contrast, mandating that fruit in a school cafeteria be displayed more conspicuously than junk food so as to increase its consumption at junk food’s expense would qualify as a nudge.