Finishing the Alphabet

After the last two posts this blog has a word starting with each of 25 letters in the alphabet. The only letter without one is y. There are a little more than six pages of y words in my dictionary, while x only has two. So to have several x words before a y word goes against mathematical probability. But since this is a word blog rather than a math blog, what does that matter?



To rectify this situation I did something I haven’t done before: looked through the dictionary to find a word to write about. There are a number of proper nouns beginning with Y, so those are eliminated. Then there are other very common words. To find a word that is useful in everyday conversation but not known well left me with no options.

What about a common word that sounds like it might have an interesting etymology? Aha (or Eureka! as the Greeks would – and Archimedes did - say). Yogurt! Well, maybe not the most intriguing etymology, but certainly one of the few words to come to English from the Turkish language. (A phrase that comes from Turkish is chock a block – meaning completely full – and comes from the Turkish words çok kalabalık.)

Yogurt, for those who don’t know, is a dairy product thickened by bacteria. Sound yummy? (Another y word that is also onomatopoetic – see blog of Nov. 17.) Yogurt, according to etymonline.com, came to English in the 1620s and “is a mispronunciation of the Turkish word yogurt, in which the -g- is a ‘soft’ sound, in many dialects closer to an English ‘w.’ The root yog means roughly ‘to condense’ and is related to yogun ‘intense,’ yogush ‘liquify’ (of water vapor), yogur ‘knead.’”

According to Wikipedia, it can be spelled yoğurt or with a tilde over the g (my Word version doesn’t have that option that I could find). Wikipedia also says that it wasn’t until the 20th century that the tilde appeared on the g, and that a few dictionaries don’t include the spelling yogurt. Instead, they have it spelled yoghurt, which is presumed by the Oxford English Dictionary (bow your heads in reverence) to be a better transcription of the sound. Perhaps the English retain the h, but I can’t remember the last time I saw the spelling yoghurt here in America.

So much for yogurt. I have space left, so let me share with you a word I find while searching the y section of the dictionary that should have more use: zaftig.

Zaftig is a Yiddish word that means tasty or yummy, although my dictionary uses the words juicy and succulent. But its use in English changed to refer only to the shapeliness of the female form. (My dictionary says “full, shapely form”.) Etymonline uses the words “alluringly, plump, curvaceous, buxom” and says that it came to English in 1937, although it doesn’t cite the source. According to http://podictionary.com/?p=1092 it first appeared in a book written by Meyer Levin called “The Old Bunch”. The podictionary episode also suggests that there are only about 200 commonly used words that came to English from Yiddish, which is about 198 more than came from Turkish.

So, enjoy a yogurt with a zaftig woman today.