There is an advertisement I consistently see on TV, especially on New York 1, that never fails to annoy me. It’s a car service ad that tries to tell the viewer what “real New Yorkers” do, and does so by repeating a “New York” catchphrase over and over: “what are you, mashugana? Real New Yorkers take Carmel!” This is their spelling, by the way.

What they’re trying to do, as far as I can tell, is get people to use their car service based on insulting them in bad Yiddish.

Yiddish, and by extension Yiddish English, are highly stigmatized, much like African American English (AAE). Both are stigmatized in large part because of (non-linguistic) prejudice against their speakers. Both also have what linguists call “covert prestige” meaning you can use them to positive effect sometimes. With AAE this often means that borrowing features of AAE can be used to construct a “tough” identity, a “dangerous” identity, or a “cool”, “in-the-know” identity. For women, sometimes it’s a “sassy” identity (think about white women adopting “girl” and “girlfriend”, for instance). With Yiddish English, it’s often a curmudgeonly, beleaguered, but comedic persona (à la Mel Brooks or Jerry Seinfeld).

All of this is related to “mock” language — best explained by Jane Hill’s discussion of “mock Spanish” in The Everyday Language of White Racism.

So what’s the problem?

There are a few issues with this ad, from a sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological stance. First and foremost, it’s borrowing language use from an ethnolect (that is, a language variety associated with a (minority) ethnicity — often strongly related to segregation), and it’s putting those words in the mouths of people who are seemingly not part of that community, and it’s doing so for comedic effect. This is not to say there aren’t black Jews (there are), or waspy jewish converts (there are), or people who live in New York, have a few Jewish friends, and picked up some Yiddishisms that they use appropriately (there are a ton). It’s just that this doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in the ad, in part because of my second point:

They do it wrong.

What they spell (and pronounce) as mashugana is the Yiddish noun (not adjective!) משוגענער meshugener: ‘lunatic, madman, crazy person.’ This is a noun derived from the adjective משוגע meshuge , originally from Hebrew מְשֻׁגָּע m’shugá ‘crazy, insane.’

The first guy, I’ll give the benefit of the doubt, as it sounds like he’s saying “what are you, a meshugener?” spoken by someone with a non-rhotic (‘r-less’) variety — something consistent with working class Jewish New York.

However, the rest of the speakers in the ad say “what are you, meshugana,” both mispronouncing the word and treating a noun as an adjective. The fact their official youtube channel spells it that way suggests it’s how they intended to use it. What’s more, their voice-over treats the noun as an adjective. Let’s break them down. First, you have a woman who seems to be stumbling over the whole line, not just the last word:

Then, a slowed down recording of a woman saying “what are you, mashuigana?”

Followed by a man again treating it as an adjective. The way he says “of course” is…shall we say, not like the “real” New Yorkers I know.

Then a man who treats at as an adjective, pronounces the /r/, but weirdly changes the final vowel (“meshuganar”):

Finally the voice over says “don’t be meshugener”.

Here’s the thing: Yiddish is not just “anything goes.” It’s not “bad German.” It’s a language. The same goes for Yiddish English, a dialect of English heavily influenced by Yiddish. And Just like AAE, there’s often a perception that it’s just “bad grammar” because it has different grammatical structures than standard English (e.g., “You want I should ask him?”).

This means that it’s entirely possible to speak it wrong. And when you dismiss it as something not worth getting correct because it’s not a “real” or “valid” language, it sends a message to the people who speak it that they aren’t of value. While most people know that approximately 6 million Yiddish speakers were killed in a genocide, fewer are aware that the strong push in the US toward cultural assimilation resulted in language repression that is a textbook example of cultural genocide (in this case, the suppression of cultural activities that do not conform to the destroyer's notion of what is appropriate). And the flip side of that is that the majority of people who do speak Yiddish natively now live in Brooklyn, and would certainly recognize this ad as not being “correct” (although they may not feel as strongly about it as I do). And heritage learners who are trying to learn the language of their grandparents or great grand parents now have little choice but to learn a “standardized” version that isn’t what their ancestors actually spoke, or the language of a particular sect from a particular place that they’re not directly related to. It’s depressing.

This business with the ad is further complicated by the fact that a generation ago there were people who did speak Yiddish well, but only used it publicly for comedic effect. Remember that mention of Mel Brooks, above? Well one of the best gags in Blazing Saddles, but also one that’s problematic from a language genocide point of view (but also that’s why it works?), has Mel Brooks playing a (generic) Native American and speaking Yiddish. In fact, he correctly declines meshugga in it. (Warning for those not already familiar with Blazing Saddles, the whole movie is puerile jokes about race and racism, and in the clip below he uses a Yiddish term that has been borrowed into English and is offensive in English but not (necessarily) in Yiddish).

None of this rises to the level that I’d have hard feelings if anyone told me they got here by taking Carmel, even though it does genuinely give me tsuris. I think the real takeaway for me, beyond the catharsis of kvetching (note to self: great title for a memoire), is something that was put best by Mel Brooks:

zayt nisht meshugga. Cop a walk.

(…instead of taking a cab)

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