“Sashura sent me a link to this NYT obituary by Margalit Fox of Sol Steinmetz, “a lexicographer, author and tenured member of Olbom (n., abbrev., < On Language’s Board of Octogenarian Mentors)”; Ms. Fox lards the obit with as many word histories (“his surname is the Yiddish word for stonemason”) as she can, and I’m sure its subject would have loved it. An excerpt:

An ordained rabbi, Mr. Steinmetz was a particular authority on Yiddish, in all its kvetchy beauty. His books on the subject include “Yiddish and English: A Century of Yiddish in America” (University of Alabama, 1986) and “Meshuggenary: Celebrating the World of Yiddish” (Simon & Schuster, 2002; with Payson R. Stevens and Charles M. Levine).

Mr. Steinmetz was a keen etymologist. In interviews and his own writings, he expounded ardently on the pedigrees of words like “klutz” (from Middle High German klotz, “block, log,” via Yiddish) and “clone” (from the Greek klon, “twig”), which entered English as a noun in 1903.

He was also a master of the first citation, scouring centuries of literature and decades of the airwaves to determine precisely when a particular word or phrase made its debut. “Suit,” in the sense of a bureaucrat, for instance, he traced to the television show “Cagney and Lacey” in 1982. Before he became a lexicographer in the late 1950s, he worked as a cantor (he “had a fine tenor voice”) and as a rabbi (in Media, Pa.); the obit ends with this wonderful passage: “‘He never had a bad word to say about anyone,’ said Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary and a former protégé. ‘And he knew a lot of bad words.'” Alevasholem.”

LanguageHat -  SOL STEINMETZ, RIP..