Some Yiddish Words Jump into American English Quickly. Others Take Much Longer.

Bertrand Horwitz writes from Asheville, North Carolina:

Your recent discussion of how the Yiddish-derived word “noodge” became incorporated in American-Jewish English and went from there to general American English reminds me of another germinating Yiddish word that suddenly appeared on national TV during the Trump-Clinton-Russia imbroglio: mishigas. Is its derivation Hebrew, Slavic, or German?

Actually, mishigas—with the stress on the last syllable and more commonly spelled mishegas—has been around in American English for a while. It’s Yiddish for “craziness” and it consists of meshuga, “crazy,” from Hebrew m’shugá, plus the Hebrew substantivizing suffix “-ut” which became “-us” in the pronunciation of Central and Eastern European Jewry. I myself wrote about mishegas back in 2005, in my pre-Mosaic days in the weekly Forward, when I commented on its use in an opinion piece by the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.