Yiddish @ Sydney

Ian Lamont has written about conducting business meetings in Second Life:

Right now, Second Life is not a great place to hold business meetings. ... I'll sum up some of the obvious problems: A poor UI, robust technical requirements, a steep learning curve, an inability to scale, and numerous distractions.

He then continues by interviewing Rebecca Nesson, of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School about her successful venture into Virtual Learning. The article can be found here.

Others have found benefits using Second LIfe (pedophiles and "bombings" and instability due to phenomenal growth notwithstanding) as evidenced by the Second Life Wiki which has an impressive list of participating institutions, mostly in the US, Canada and the UK. Those institutions in Australia that are listed are mostly technological programs (film, digital) with the exception of USQ.

While I will peruse the courses of the participating institutions, I think the steep UI and the access to a reliable -- and speedy -- ISP for students remains an issue.

Still waiting for Outback Online...

Finally! I received a copy of The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Normally I'd recommend that you read reviews before a book. Unfortunately, many of them out there now have a HUGE spoiler (including the Australian reviews), I'd suggest you not touch that literary section, but rather go out to your local book store and get a copy for yourself.

My own reading has been hampered by a tenacious migraine, but I can tell you that it's funny, it's a crime story in the noir tradition and it's very Yiddish. The sentence structure is often Yiddish, the slang and the blessings/curses are Yiddish (although they cuss "in American") and the culture is well-researched. It is an alternate history, so if you like you fiction to have its facts 100% accurate -- well, then you'd miss the point.

The inspiration for the book came from a small book in the Dover Say It In ... series, the Yiddish one, written by Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich. Students will know the Weinreich name, as Max (Uriel's father) was one of the founders of YIVO, Uriel is that genius linguist who wrote College Yiddish when he was just out of his teens, and Beatrice -- Uriel's wife -- is a folklorist who studied folktales, in particular the Elijah cycles. Chabon, upon purchasing the booklet, wrote an essay wondering where on earth one would use the phrases provided.

And now, we know where -- in Sitka, Alaska.

Later there will be a "cheat sheet" here so you'll know your beans* from your goat turds.**

*a bean is באָב (pronounced, "bob" or "bub" and in plural "beb" -- the similarity may be where the phrase "he doesn't know from a hill of beans" gets confused with the phrase below)

*a goat turd is באָבקע (pronounced "bobke" or "bubke"), so Sam Spade doesn't know from goat turds. Beans, he knows.

While students registered at Sydney Uni are able to download EndNote, some people don't like to use it (not sure why except its quirkiness perhaps). This is to let you know that there are other *free* alternatives.

Two worth mentioning:

• Easy Bib (mybib): You enter the details and it formats the citation according to either MLA or APA rules. Once you're finished, click on format, then add another entry. At the end you can print, download as an rtf file or view it online. If you click "save", a copy will be emailed and you can access your bibliography later.
  
• BibMe: will find the references for you. You can use autofill or manually enter the data. The engine will search for the media you choose, then you select the entry you'd like to add to your bibliography. Once you've selected the entry, it will display it in your chosen format (MLA, APA, Chicago) to the right. After you've complied your bibliography, you can either download the list, save it to your account (after you've registered, obviously) or start over.
  

Note that these generate bibliographies. You're still on your own or going to have to rely on EndNote for foot/endnotes.

Apparently, in a recent episode of The Sopranos, one of the characters used the word tsores (Yiddish for troubles, worries, woes; in a more Polish-Yiddish accent "tsuris") and sparked a debate about the extent to which Yiddish has entered the American vernacular.

An NBC anchor, Brian Williams, remarked about the usage, and wrote about it here in his guest entry in the Slate blog. In it he asks:

Where did "tsoris" come from during Christopher's impromptu stairwell AA after-meeting? I was rocked by it. Was I alone?

The Forward remarked:

Some on staff, arguing that tsoris — Yiddish for “trouble” — has entered the American vernacular, found the use of the word unremarkable; others maintained that it was worthy of note. Williams sided with the second camp.

The resident Sopranos fan at the Forward hadn't even noticed the utterance, but then again, being a Jewish New Yorker, it might not have tickled his radar.

So, being curious, I've tossed a question out to a friend, who is also a native New Yorker (she's a good Italian-Irish mix), but has little problem understanding me when I toss in Yiddish expressions.

It seems to me, that a New York character, no matter what their ethnicity, would have no qualms about using tsores: it's less shocking than hearing a character from Kansas who mumbles "Christo" to sniff out demonic presences, suddenly chirp "mazl tov".

A blog and YouTube "reklame" (רעקלאַמע, advert) by Prof. Wirth-Nesher about this year's Summer Program.

This has been brought to you by the Yiddish Forward. However, if you go to the article from whence I snagged the info (the article is "Yinglish" from the 4th of May), you will notice that the link (פֿאַרבינדונג -- it's in your vocabulary) is not to the blog, but to another רעקלאַמע for one of the Forward's audio-books.

See, even the professionals goof up. Heartening, isn't it?

Just a short blurb, but worth the journey.

A World in Your Ear

A new source for creating web-based notes that are shareable.

Based on Stickies, this site lets you create notes for hard-copy texts (linking the note to the ISBN number and therefore to the listing in Amazon) as well as online resources (websites, podcasts, videos). The notes are tagged and can be kept private or shared.

It looks useful (no Yiddish there yet, I'm afraid -- it's mostly maths at this point) and easy to use. The Flash Demo is a bit tedious, but worth watching for the initial set-up.

Study Stickies