Friday, June 24, 2005

Jargon or shprach

At Mystical Politics a person comments in a thread about Toby-Gate that "I think the passion one feels for her Judaism should, lulei demistafina, be steered toward a more positive relationship with God and Jews".
To which, replied one Gary Farber, that
"Results 1 - 10 of about 102 English pages for "lulei demistafina."This is also not something that, it appears, might speak to many people who only speak English.
My own, highly limited, experience with this sort of thing -- in general! -- is that jargon is often used to signal to others that they belong to the same group, but to the yet other others that they don't belong. That makes sense in various situations. I'm unclear if that's actually useful, though, if a desired goal is communication beyond the small group. It's certainly not clear to me that such usage invites Jews to participate who don't know the code. To be sure, though, and I mean this in the kindest fashion, I've already turned down some fine invites, so welcoming invites aren't all that would help. I do hope I'm not saying this too badly, but I won't be surprised if I am, as usual. Hebrew, is to also be sure, not a bad thing, to say the least. It's just that as a test for being a proper Jew, it does seem to put some of us here and some of us there, for better or for worse, and that's all I'm saying.
Interesting point. Still, although "lulei demistafina" is definitely that sort of jargon, he also explained that "hagbah" was just as mysterious to him. I'm reasonably sure (okay, 100% sure) that in these hagbah discussions no one was being exclusionary and wouldn't have occurred to anyone that they were, although if one thinks about it there are probably a lot of things that I write that are unintelligible to readers and not just because I can't communicate my thoughts properly.

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