May 10, 2017
Of Noodge and Nudge, of Slob and Schlub
By PhilologosA look at the phenomenon by which Yiddish words become English words under the influence of other, similar-sounding English words.
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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.”