Israel's organization of technical/marcom writers and copy editors
Troubles have always been with us, but it’s Rabbi Shmuel Hanagid — the eleventh-century scholar, poet, and Chief Vizier of Grenada — whom the dictionary credits with reporting he worked his way through an occurrence of tsara tsrura, “trouble in a bundle.”
Read MoreThe Targemni website gives “exciting, sensational” as its definition. Morfix, on the other hand, says “inflaming, inciteful.”
Read MoreI asked around and my sister-in-law, a Sabra of a certain age, told me the slogan was used years ago by the Payis lottery. On the Internet, all I found was a single hit, in which Shlomo Hillel (of all people), serving as Speaker of the Knesset in 1988, refers to the phrase as if it’s familiar.
Read MoreIn the news, you often see “exaggerate” used inappropriately to translate "l'hagzim." For example, an Israeli colonel was quoted in the Jerusalem Post as saying, “We did not exaggerate in our use of firepower.” Presumably he didn’t mean exaggeration in the sense of trying to inflate a story, he meant simply “We did not use too much firepower.”
Read MoreThere are two Hebrew translations of “Les Trois Cloches” — one by Ehud Manor and one by Avi Koren. Unlike the English translation, both Hebrew translations leave Jean-François Nicot a Frenchman. They don’t localize him, they foreignize him.
Read MoreEncouraging eleventh-graders to enroll for an educational trip to Poland, a Hebrew letter quoted in Wiktionary says that the trip will surely add an important נדבך (nidbakh) to them personally as citizens of the sovereign state of Israel. The word nidbakh goes back to the Book of Ezra, where King James translates it as “row”: “... with three rows of great stones, and a row of new timber...”
Read MoreI found that on the Internet, source after source says a t’tsugat tachleet is not the performance that is the culmination or the purpose of someone’s efforts, or that demonstrates what others should aim for, but a mere “lesson introduction.” This week we will learn to multiply decimals, or whatever.
Read MoreWhile the song “City of New Orleans” is all about America and its Israeli version is all about Israel, the French lyrics don’t mention France. Nationalism has not been widely admired in France for quite some time. But “Salut les Amoureux,” the song’s French version as performed by Joe Dassin, does give us a dose of tension relating to the narrator. It’s a good French existentialist tension that takes the form of observing your own behavior detachedly.
Read MoreOn packaging, I’ve seen the term “Moroccan spearmint” used for nana, and I’ve used it myself in translations, so I’m not happy thinking that maybe the real stuff is from Asia Minor and I should have written “Anatolian spearmint” instead.
Read MoreExplaining British punctuation, Oxford Dictionaries writes: “If an abbreviation consists of the first and last letters of a word, you don’t need to use a full stop at the end,” and its examples are “Mr”, “Ltd”, and “Dr”. Actually the abbreviation “Ltd” doesn’t consist of the first and last letters of the word, although it uses them. But maybe fine distinctions of terminology aren’t what the Oxford Dictionaries are about.
Read MoreAs the scriptural saying goes. “From all my teachers, I’ve learned.” The Even Shoshan dictionary agrees with King James that when the Psalmist used it, that remark actually meant “I have more understanding than all my teachers.”
Read MoreThe word ma’aneh seems to enjoy staying in reserve while the word tshuva does conversational duty to describe the answer required by an everyday request for directions or by an arithmetic exercise. The word ma’aneh comes out for the bigger questions. Sometimes questions that don’t even come with a question mark. The question of nuclear proliferation. The heat of August. The needs of a particular child.
Read MoreAs a term meaning “childless,” the word ערירי (ariri) is first found where God promises to reward Abram generously and Abram asks what the point of any reward is with no one to bequeath it to: מה־תתן־לי ואנכי הולך ערירי (“what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless” — King James). It’s not the sort of response you’d expect to hear from a childless man today, for example from some elderly bachelor offered a prize on a quiz show.
Read MoreAn English-speaking woman I once worked with would refer to a sturdy, muscular man as a mac, because in the media someone often calls out “Hey, mac!” to such a fellow and she reckoned it had something to do with strength, like a Mack truck. To me it makes as much sense as many other word derivations, but unfortunately none of the dictionary writers have got behind it.
Read MoreSo what are these persistences called in English — these things that can make us perceive inexactly, or act neurotically, for sedimental reasons?
Read MoreEphraim Kishon wrote a story once about a Purim party where the people try hard to celebrate but leave more gloomy than when they arrived. Evidently it’s a failing of ours. When I went to the Internet to research the term “asak”— which refers to the good cheer, informality, and celebrations that go with the approach of graduation from an army course — what I found more than anything else was soldiers looking for ideas of exactly how to cut loose and have fun for the occasion, being without inspiration themselves.
Read MoreOver here in Israel, if I understand my history correctly, the askan was the person who brought funds in to support the poor and their institutions as far back as the 19th century, when the poor and their institutions were pretty much all we had. Our 20th-century socialist pioneers, strong on self-reliance, looked forward to the extinction of the askan and his fellow luftmenschen, and that pioneer contempt is nowhere better expressed than in the Morfix.com definition of askan as “go-getter, politico, wheeler-dealer.”
Read MoreMy paper dictionaries are too old, I regret, to think כוחניות has anything to do with bullies. The three-volume Alkalay refers the reader from כֹחניות to כֹחיות, which it says is the same as כֹחנות, both carrying two meanings. One meaning is vigor — כֹחניות as a benign term, reflecting the way Popeye handles his strength rather than the way Bluto does. The other meaning is potentiality.
Read MoreDictionaries tend to favor the spatial definition of לקראת: The Dvir dictionary says “to meet, towards,” and it mentions that the root is קרא (as in “Hey, you!”). Sivan and Levenston’s Bantam dictionary also says “towards” but it adds the meanings “for” and “in view of,” taking into account that as the time of an occurrence approaches, it influences our behavior. We might say we bought a new electric heater לקראת החורף and mean that we bought it because winter was impending. On the other hand, we might also say that לקראת החורף we bought a new electric toothbrush.
Read MoreSite for Israel's professional tech writing and marcom community. Originally based in what has become Israel's 2nd largest R&D center (Yokneam), Elephant brings together technical and marcom writers from all over Israel. Behind the scenes and between meetings, members stay in contact with job offers and leads, joint projects, and professional assistance.
Using the wrong technical writer is like using a wrench to open a door, it works, but a door knob is better and cheaper. Elephant was started to help match writers and copy editors with companies where their skills match company needs.
