Desperate Irish Housewife, a New Yorker transplanted here (and who is a member of my parish), is having trouble with the local dialect of Yiddish.
What's really going on is a common malapropism. Yiddish words for "penis" seem especially prone to this for some reason.
So as a public service, here's a link to a glossary of Yinglish.
After we moved back from the UK, I noticed the same thing about "bugger." Here it's a friendly little term for something annoying but often endearing; there it's so vulgar that it can't be printed in the newspaper.
Posted by: CJ | 01 December 2006 at 07:55 PM