There's a Word for It

The gold standard for obituary writing is usually on display in the New York Times. And when one of their writers, either by luck of the wheel, or by their cajoling, gets a hold of something that is close to their heart, it shows.

A perfect example of this is Margalit Fox's obituary on Sol Steinmetz, 80, a writer and a lexicographer who breathed his last word recently, but who inspired others to heap more than a few very well chosen ones on him.

Ms. Fox is a linguist who has written at least one book on language, sign language. But she is usally found on the obituary page turning out the more than occasional gem, generally about an inimitable New Yorker who has passed on and possibly vacated a rent-controlled apartment.

Mr. Steinmetz was right in Ms. Fox's wheelhouse. We was a writer, a lexicographer, and maven on the Yiddish language, who was sought after by the likes of William Safire (a mensch himself), media outlets and several major publishing houses for his insight into how words came to mean what people take them for.

Ms. Fox has evident fun is using her own knowledge of words to describe Mr. Steinmetz. Gilbert and Sullivan-like prose gets woven with Yiddish and Germanic entymology that after reading about Sol you wonder why you suddenly crave hot pastrami, strudel, and cold beer.

Since I’ve been growing up in New York (which I still am) I always knew that there is usually a good, succinct Yiddish word for something. And perhaps like a good researcher, I set out one day to find the word I knew that must exist.

When New York's governor Eliot Spitzer was free-falling from grace because of a prostitution scandal a few years ago, I asked the salesman at Saks in the menswear department, Jerry Straus, (who I knew knew Yiddish) what would be the Yiddish word to describe Spitzer?

Jerry, while still sizing me up and the inventory, didn’t miss a beat and told me the word/phrase would be “pes koon yack.” (My phonetic spelling.) I asked him what it meant.

I recorded his explanation on a piece of paper that I still carry around with me. I gave it a hieroglyphic notation on my note page of ‘<<,’ meaning what Jerry told me, "lower than low." As expected, I was right about Yiddish having the perfect way to describe someone. I learned a few other Yiddish words that evening while picking out a sport coat, but that’s another story. Ms. Fox closes her ode to Sol by by quoting someone as saying that Mr. Steinmetz was known as never having a bad word to say about anyone. But then again, he did know Yiddish quite well.

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