"The Yiddish
Kvetch: Relating Language to Culture" (review of Born to
Kvetch by Michael Wex).
"If
Kvetch had been performed in North Korea, or Iran, it would have got the same reactions," he says.
He has authored a novel, Shlepping the Exile (2) and a recent non-fiction book on Yiddish, Born to
Kvetch. (3) Born to
Kvetch has been acclaimed in the mainstream and Jewish press (including The New York Times (4) and the Forward (5).
Now, though, Ephron
kvetches about her wrinkled neck, the one part of a woman's aging body that can't be resurfaced.
Finally, to understand what New Yorkers are talking about (tawkinabow), any newcomer unfamiliar with Basic Yinglish will need to take a crash course to grasp such classic locutions as shlep (to lug, carry),
kvetch (complain, whine), shmuck (a dope, jerk, in Yiddish a penis), shmeer (to spread or a spread), and oy (an untranslatable exclamation that Leo Rosten describes as not a word but a vocabulary).
In "Stressed out on four continents: Time crunch or yuppie
kvetch?" (National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper Series) Daniel S.
May we look back on this time and find that all we had to
kvetch about was gridlock.
In the rare cases in which they no longer work, they still come to the DDC to socialize,
kvetch, play games, and hang around.
It is likely that my job advancement was due to my obnoxious corrections of the editors' atrocious Yiddish pronunciations, demonstrating to White Anglo Saxon Protestants how to
kvetch as well as properly articulate the word, reminding ARIL officers not to schedule board meetings on Jewish holy days, and schlepping (my special expertise) mail sacks and buttering up the post office's periodicals supervisor.
However, the manager in firm A likes to complain (in Yiddish, "
kvetch") more about government action, and thus may report more bribery and more harassment.
It's common for new and small wineries to
kvetch that distributors don't give them the warm response they naturally expect.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who apparently still thinks of himself as a centrist liberal, and a host of rightwing pundits
kvetch about the threat that identity politics poses to our "common culture"; they sound the tocsin against it as a harbinger of the new barbarism.
Its voguish Greek-derived title Architrenius means 'Archlamenter' (or perhaps, less respectfully, 'The Master
Kvetch').