{"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>&#8220;<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, &#8220;a lexicographer, author and tenured member of Olbom (<strong>n.<\/strong>,\u00c2\u00a0<em>abbrev<\/em>., &lt; On Language\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Board of Octogenarian Mentors)&#8221;; Ms. Fox lards the obit with as many word histories (&#8220;his surname is the Yiddish word for stonemason&#8221;) as she can, and I&#8217;m 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 &amp; 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 &#8220;had a fine tenor voice&#8221;) and as a rabbi (in Media, Pa.); the obit ends with this wonderful passage: &#8220;&#8216;He never had a bad word to say about anyone,&#8217; said Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary and a former prot\u00c3\u00a9g\u00c3\u00a9. &#8216;And he knew a lot of bad words.'&#8221; Alevasholem.&#8221;<\/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>&#8220;Sashura sent me a link to\u00c2\u00a0this NYT obituary by Margalit Fox of Sol Steinmetz, &#8220;a lexicographer, author and tenured member of Olbom (n.,\u00c2\u00a0abbrev., &lt; On Language\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Board of Octogenarian Mentors)&#8221;; Ms. Fox lards the obit with as many word histories (&#8220;his surname is the Yiddish word for stonemason&#8221;) as she can, and I&#8217;m sure its [&hellip;]<\/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}]}}