I suppose you must be in a crossword solving mood to notice that all four names of today's constructors are four letters long...
Well, on this Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, may the Schwartz be with you. YIDDISH is well established in our vocabulary, especially in the hallowed pages of the New York Times. I'd say from my Jewish perspective that three of these phrases are common usage (SCHMALTZ, CHUTZPAH, and OYGEVALT), while TCHOTCHKE is fairly common.
I suppose VERKLEMPT might be familiar to those who watched Mike Myers's character Linda Richman and her show Coffee Talk on 1990s Saturday Night Live. MEGILLAH though is probably new to most solvers.
None of that kept me from speeding through this puzzle. My fastest time ever for a Wednesday. I appreciate such bits as the non-Yiddish word SCHNAUZER (simply German in this case) and OCEANIA. I don't really have much to complain about. It's a reasonable Wednesday.
Oh, and how about that CTRLZ? That definitely takes some chutzpah!
May your fast be easy.
- Colum
8:07
ReplyDeleteBoy, I thought I went pretty quickly on this one! Hah!
From my non-Jewish perspective, you are pretty close. I have never seen OYGEVALT spelled out before in my life, and really, I'm not sure I've ever heard it. But maybe I have, and I just thought the speaker was adding onto the more familiar "Oy!" As for MEGILLAH, my only referent is the homonym in Magilla Gorilla, but I was unable to prove the name's derivation. Wikipedia did say, though, that in one episode someone says "Such a MEGILLAH over a gorilla!" The nuance of such a line, had I heard it, would have been lost on grade-school me.
Fun puzzle, though. Language learning is a big plus for middle-aged me! :)