{"id":309,"date":"2010-10-26T01:20:51","date_gmt":"2010-10-26T01:20:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomwsmf.com\/blog\/?p=309"},"modified":"2011-01-16T07:55:23","modified_gmt":"2011-01-16T07:55:23","slug":"sol-steinmetz-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomwsmf.com\/blog\/?p=309","title":{"rendered":"SOL STEINMETZ, RIP."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201c<span style=\"font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: normal; border-collapse: collapse;\">Sashura sent me a link to\u00c2\u00a0<a style=\"color: #2244bb;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/10\/25\/books\/25steinmetz.html?_r=1\" target=\"_blank\">this NYT obituary<\/a> by Margalit Fox of Sol Steinmetz, \u201ca lexicographer, author and tenured member of Olbom (<strong>n.<\/strong>,\u00c2\u00a0<em>abbrev<\/em>., < On Language\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Board of Octogenarian Mentors)\u201d; Ms. Fox lards the obit with as many word histories (\u201chis surname is the Yiddish word for stonemason\u201d) as she can, and I\u2019m sure its subject would have loved it. An excerpt:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: normal; border-collapse: collapse;\"><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>An ordained rabbi, Mr. Steinmetz was a particular authority on Yiddish, in all its kvetchy beauty. His books on the subject include \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yiddish and English: A Century of Yiddish in America\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (University of Alabama, 1986) and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Meshuggenary: Celebrating the World of Yiddish\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Simon & Schuster, 2002; with Payson R. Stevens and Charles M. Levine).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Mr. Steinmetz was a keen etymologist. In interviews and his own writings, he expounded ardently on the pedigrees of words like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153klutz\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (from Middle High German\u00c2\u00a0<em>klotz<\/em>, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153block, log,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d via Yiddish) and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153clone\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (from the Greek\u00c2\u00a0<em>klon<\/em>, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153twig\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), which entered English as a noun in 1903.<\/p>\n<p>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. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Suit,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the sense of a bureaucrat, for instance, he traced to the television show \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Cagney and Lacey\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in 1982. Before he became a lexicographer in the late 1950s, he worked as a cantor (he \u201chad a fine tenor voice\u201d) and as a rabbi (in Media, Pa.); the obit ends with this wonderful passage: \u201c\u2018He never had a bad word to say about anyone,\u2019 said Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary and a former prot\u00c3\u00a9g\u00c3\u00a9. \u2018And he knew a lot of bad words.'\u201d Alevasholem.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n<p>LanguageHat -\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.languagehat.com\/archives\/004029.php\">SOL STEINMETZ, RIP.<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cSashura sent me a link to\u00c2\u00a0this NYT obituary by Margalit Fox of Sol Steinmetz, \u201ca lexicographer, author and tenured member of Olbom (n.,\u00c2\u00a0abbrev., < On Language\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Board of Octogenarian Mentors)\u201d; Ms. Fox lards the obit with as many word histories (\u201chis surname is the Yiddish word for stonemason\u201d) as she can, and I\u2019m sure its [&hellip;]\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tribe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomwsmf.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomwsmf.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomwsmf.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomwsmf.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomwsmf.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/tomwsmf.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomwsmf.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomwsmf.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomwsmf.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}