EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT NAME-CALLING BUT WERE TOO FERMISHT TO ASK

S'iz shver tsu zayn a Yid
(It's tough to be a Jew) - Yiddish folk saying

Okay, it’s a valid Yiddish folk saying, but the word “Yid” has become an insult. It shouldn’t be; it only means Jew — from the word “jüde" (pronounced “yood”). It’s perfectly neutral, and therefore proper, in Germany (of all places) to say, for instance, “ein jüdisch deutsch"; all it means is “a person who’s Jewish-German"). The letters J and Y are interchangeable in some languages; a name like Sonja is pronounced Sonya, and I’m old enough to remember a newspaper headline about Jugoslavia.


Not to digress, BUT: You can see Sonja Henie on YouTube if you don’t mind grainy film. She does lots of pirouettes, skates backwards, runs on her tiptoes halfway across the rink, and has a single-rotation jump which she performs twice in her routine, and for that she gets the 1934 gold medal.