Facebook friend NOE GOLD writes us with this news:
Just in time for Hannukah, my own Yiddish Glossary for Goyim: The Power Shmoozer’s Guide to Hollywood, in hard copy: $12 per for FB’ers:. Six copies or more, $10 per + s&h. For more info, write Noe at noemedia@pacbell.net.
In the era of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, movie moguls tended to spice their jargon with expressions from the colorful vernacular of their pushcart-peddling forebears. The euphony of Yiddish is a tradition for describing cinematic phenomena that has endured to the present day, in which modern power brokers tend to pepper their pronouncements about deals, reels and shpiels with the inimitable lilt of Yiddish. With the Yiddish Glossary for Goyim, anybody can be an expert tummler, not ferklempt and never farblunjet.
Noë Gold has been Features Editor at the Hollywood Reporter, a contributor to Variety and a staff writer at Paramount Pictures. He has been editor-in-chief of Movies USA, bikini and Guitar World and a columnist for the Village Voice and the New York Daily News. He has served as the Managing Editor of VH1 and a writer-producer for Turner Broadcasting. His entertainment news column, The Daily Fix, was a regular feature of the AOL Entertainment Channel. Noë Gold blogs at Doctor Noe’s Gadget,
Gold, a child of Holocaust survivors who spoke Yiddish as his very first language, began the Yiddish Glossary while taking meetings as the editor of Movies USA and it developed a following, being passed around in manuscript form in the suites and watering holes of Hollywood. When the LA Times excerpted portions of it, Gold decided to one day publish it as a handy reference tome. Thus was born the Yiddish Glossary for Goyim.
Spielberg Talks Shpilkas on Oprah’s Next Chapter
Steven Spielberg said he needed fire in the belly to direct “Lincoln”: “I had shpilkas every day on the set. I used that.”
… now if she only had her handy Yiddish Glossary for Goyim, she’d know exactly what he was talkin’ ’bout
Shpilkas (shpill-kahs): somewhere between butterflies and hives:“He was having sphilkas about the audition.”
Shtupp (shtoop): vulgar term for the sexual act” “The movie had all kinds of shtupping; it was definitely not a first-class item.”
