When Nonsense Syllables Make Perfect Sense

The American Jewish sociologist Jerome Chanes has sent me a recent article of his that begins with the sentence, “There is an increased tararam—in some cases bordering on hysteria—surrounding anti-Semitism.” And he adds this note:

A number of my readers have asked me about the word “tararam,” which I have been using in writing and speech for seven decades and more, having first heard it from my Yiddish-speaking parents and relatives, all born in Czernowitz. I am at a loss what to answer. Are its origins Yiddish? Russian? Ukrainian? Polish? What do you think?

I myself am most familiar with tararam from Hebrew, in which it means—as it does in Mr. Chanes’s English article—“fuss” or “hullabaloo.” Its earliest Hebrew attestation given by the dictionaries is in a children’s poem by Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik written before World War I. At the time, Bialik was living in Odessa, and he was probably describing its annual military parade on the tsar’s name day: