Fun

I have a randomly vivid memory of once working on a small but satisfying project and, when I got caught at it, I shrugged, “I had fun,” which brief and dismissive adjective does not begin to capture the thrill of it.

This came to mind recently when I was speaking with a learned friend who had just stayed up all night working on a composition in a somewhat obscure corner of Torah which she then mailed to the world expert in that subject; and as my jaw was dropping on the other end of the phone, she dismissed the evening as, “I had fun.”

And I began to think that there was an essay in the making here when another teacher recently described his aspiration in life and concluded, in the tones that schoolgirls use for giggles, “It'd be fun!”

The word “fun” exists to describe superficial pleasure, the sort of thing that you like even when you are too old to esteem it as deeply important. “Fun” is what fun parks are for. “Fun” is the aesthetic that has replaced “beautiful”: e.g., 1920's-styled shoes are beautiful but bright aqua 1920's-styled shoes are both beautiful and fun. I like fun but the feeling that you are doing what you were put on this planet to do is quite another thing.

In Hebrew there are oneg and taanug, which are related forms of pleasure, and there are other adjectives for the sort of pleasure that one gets from bright aqua shoes, and there are ten different kinds of happiness (gila, rina, ditza, chedva, simcha, sason... I actually know a family who went down a list like this to name their daughters) but there is no direct translation of “fun” – no word so bland that it can be flung about to mean anything from “cute” to “reckless”. Hebrew-speakers who need to use an all-purpose word like “fun” have to borrow the word kef from Arabic.

I'm beginning to wish that the word didn't exist in English either. People hide behind it when they are feeling emotional about something and are disinclined to express how strongly they feel about it.

Last night I asked a young veteran what it's like to be shot at –which is, to be sure, an invasive question; but he brought it up-- and he said, “It's not fun,” and with that I had to be content.

I propose that we all take the trouble to fish about for a better adjective when we are caught red-handed    having emotions.

The Adventures of Lemon Juice: an exercise for learning Hebrew

Once upon a time we had, every morning, a bottle of lemon juice on the table, with a Hebrew label: Mitz Limon Meshumar.
Mitz = juice
Limon = lemon
Meshumar = preserved (like shomer, shmirah, shomer Shabbos... it means guarded)
Preserved Lemon Juice.

Every morning, this bottle wound up on the table in precisely the same position, so that all we could see from where we sat was Mitz Limon Meshu...
We found different ways to finish the word.

It would make a good exercise for people learning Hebrew... only you'd better use a different label, as I think we've pretty much exhausted the possibilities of lemon juice.

Mitz Limon Meshumar... preserved lemon juice.
Mitz Limon Meshupatz... renovated lemon juice.
Mitz Limon Meshuga... crazy lemon juice.
Mitz Limon Meshuchrar... freed lemon juice.
Mitz Limon Meshutaf... lemon juice in a partnership.
Mitz Limon Meshulal... lemon juice captured as booty.
Mitz Limon Meshuneh... bizarre lemon juice.
Mitz Limon Meshubad... subjugated lemon juice.
Mitz Limon Meshupar... beautified lemon juice.
Mitz Limon Meshulach... lemon juice dispatched on an errand (usually fundraising).
Mitz Limon Meshulam... lemon juice paid for in full.
Mitz Limon Meshulash... triangular lemon juice.
Mitz Limon Meshukatz... lemon juice afflicted by vermin.
Mitz Limon Meshum... lemon juice made of garlic.
Mitz Limon Meshurar... lemon juice sung-about (I am not sure this word actually exists).

Ants for the antless

One of the character traits prized in Judaism is zerizus, which translates as... what, exactly?
Occasionally you see it translated as "alacrity".
When my friend asks her children, "Who wants to get Abba a cup of water?" her son from the Yiddish-speaking cheder exclaims "Zrizus!" as he topples off his booster seat and sprints for the kitchen, so I guess that's the definition he's been taught.

King Solomon instructs lazy people to "Go to the ant... see her ways, and become wise." (Prov. 6:6) If you watch ants (at least, the ones in my neighborhood), their most outstanding characteristic is not exactly frenzied haste. What they possess supports the translation I once heard from Rabbi Chalkowski (Rn. Bambi's husband): diligence.


Seriously. Go watch some ants.


There is a YouTube video currently making the rounds to teach diligence to the chronically antless.
I'm not going to post it here, because it really is a waste of time -it's probably a better lesson in zerizus not to watch it; but should you ever be short of ants, you can look it up.
It consists of three minutes of a slinky walking a treadmill.

Entish for humans

If you don't know what Entish is, you obviously haven't read enough of Tolkien's fiction. The intrepid may venture here: http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/entish.htm
Entish words run extremely long, because each contains a detailed description: "Forestmanyshadowed-deepvalleyblack Deepvalleyforested Gloomyland". Trees, and their Entish shepherds, have time to talk like that. If you love poetic language, it's enough to make you want to be an Ent.

Is there a language with the integrity and evocative description of Entish that can be spoken at a pace suitable for humans?
There is. It's called Hebrew.

In Hebrew (Biblical Hebrew), every word - every word - has a three-letter "root". That root has a meaning.
This system exists, to some degree, in English: spoke, speak, and speaking are clearly related - enough that if you come across spake in an old text, you know what it means.
English is like Silly Putty - every language that ever got thrown at it stuck. By now English contains also spokes of a wheel, and specks, and spic and span, so that knowing speak  does not help you figure out what these other words mean. Speak and a dime will get you a ride on the subway.
In Hebrew the subway is free. All words with the same root are related.

More: all roots that sound alike are related.
More: each letter has a meaning (e.g. a ch will take the place of an h in a root to convey a harsher meaning), and all letters that sound alike are related. Entish is the language of Tolkien's trees, but Hebrew is shaped like one.
There are families of roots. There are families of letters. If you know one word in Hebrew, it isn't hard to learn a second. The Hebrew alphabet functions like the Periodic Table of the Elements.

This is seldom taught in Hebrew courses, which is a pity. People come out of Hebrew classes grousing that the language has two genders to keep track of, like French, and thinking that Hebrew is a difficult and sprawling language. Non, non, non. I used to teach Hebrew, and the shortcuts are real, and even before we get into its being a Divine language, it is an insanely gorgeous one, because if one letter has a meaning,
and you add to that another letter with another meaning,
and make of this a word with a root with a deeper meaning,
and this root calls to mind all the other words that grow from it, as well as the other related roots - by a power of association which does not exist in English- why, here we are with as complex a word as Entish, a word that expresses the essence of the thing, with perfect integrity, to say nothing of a great deal of poetry or of the joy of all those words being related to each other. And it took only three letters to get here.

(Why two genders? Having male and female words allows for subtle shades of meaning: e.g., using a female adjective for a male noun indicates something feminine about it.)