The Variety and Universality of Nicknames

Diana Lipton writes from Jerusalem to ask: “What is the origin of the affectionate ‘-ush’ that Israelis so often append to the names of family members and close friends?”

Israelis do indeed do this. Sometimes the endearing ending is “-kush” rather than “-ush.” When they were little, my wife and I often called our elder daughter Talyush (which in turn morphed into Talyushki) and her sister Michalkush, and their own children also get “-ushed” and “-kushed” quite a lot, albeit not with any strict regularity. It’s an endearment that tends to be used by grown-ups for children but less often by children or teenagers for each other, and in most cases it disappears as one grows up. Yet this is not always so; there are adult relationships in which it persists. “-Ush” can also be resorted to spontaneously. If I have a friend named Edna and I wish to be playful or affectionate with her, I might address her as “Ednush” even if I’ve never done it before.

The use of “-ush” as a hypocoristic affix, as nicknames of this sort are known to linguists (the word comes from the ancient Greek verb hypokorizesthai, to caress secretly), entered modern Hebrew from Yiddish. It occurs in Yiddish names like Berush and Leybush (in some dialects Berish and Leybish), whose base forms are Ber and Leyb, and its roots are Slavic. One encounters it in such Polish hypocorisms as Oluś for Aleksander, Jędruś for Andrzej, and Eduś for Edward, and in Russian, followed by a vowel, in Vanyusha for Ivan, Petrusha for Pyotr, Nadyusha for Nadezhda, and so on. The “-ushka” ending is also common in Russian, as in Annushka for Anna, Nastyushka for Anastasya, and Styopushka for Stepan.