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I got caught in the crossfire of a dispute at the shtieblach in Beis Yisrael, Yerushalayim. Shtieblach is the plural of shtiebel — literally, a small house. It refers to…
Get out your pencil. It’s quiz time: Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb? No, he’s not. Ulysses S. Grant and his wife are entombed — not buried — in sarcophagi…
If you think meme is the sound of an opera singer warming up, you are blessedly innocent to the ways of the web. Memes are images or phrases that are…
About 30 years ago, I went into a shop in Manhattan and ordered two cups of black coffee — one of them decaffeinated. Before handing me the coffee, the Asian…
My grandson Avraham Yitzchak came home from day camp one day, zonked from obstacle races. Frankly, that was surprising. When he was 2, and a training wheel fell off his…
Ever have one of those decades? Has it ever seemed you just can’t win for losing? Things just seem to go haywire? Haywire is a low-tech term for out of…
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Everybody knows that proverb. Some people know that it was the English poet Alexander Pope who said it. Only he didn’t. As Ralph…
OK, take your seat. It’s quiz time. Now list three grammar rules you never heard of. Had you there for a second, didn’t I? How can you list them if…
My son Meilech has a friend who studiously cultivated his New Yorkese. Once, after hearing my wife speaking, he ran over to Meilech and said, “Your mothah’s got ACCENT!” Accent…
My father, z”l, once heard someone complain, “I work like a dog a whole year, and comes Pesach, I don’t have a piece of bread on the table.” Without missing…
There I was, minding my own business. (Actually I was minding somebody else’s business — editing an article. But that’s my business.) Suddenly, something jumped out at me. It wasn’t…
There is absolutely no basis to the rumor I made up that the word Purim is derived from poorim — a plural of poor. Purim means lots, as in a…
A little bird told me to write this. OK, it wasn’t a bird. But it sounded like one. It was a tweet. (Disclosure: I use Twitter, but I never fully…
In simmering irony that barely keeps from boiling over, Mark Twain told how Huckleberry Finn battled his conscience over helping a slave escape. Huck had always been taught that slavery…
Pull up a chair. I’ve got a story for you. Back when I was a mail-order copywriter, one day I was drinking decaffeinated coffee. (It was before a fast day…
In early January, irate victims of cyberattacks, data breaches, and tech giants’ peddling of private information smashed computer network servers in Palo Alto, California. Waves of attacks spread to Menlo…
There’s a pernicious rumor going around that Chicken Little was wrong. However, unlike our little feathered friend, I didn’t run with Henny Penny and Ducky Lucky to tell the king…
Call me a perfectionist (thank you), but whenever I write, edit or proofread, I keep my reference toolkit close at hand. Along with essential dictionaries, thesauruses and usage manuals, I…
When my son Meilech was in his early single digits (I’m not good with numbers), his sisters celebrated birthdays in close succession. Feeling left out, Meilech asked, “When is my…
I lied. Maybe I’d better rephrase that. I exaggerated. Actually, a more precise term would be hyperbole — “the rhetorical device of deliberate overstatement” (Garner’s Modern English Usage). Vocabulary.com defines…