On Chutzpah.

Michelle Bachman's mispronunciation of "חוצפה" of as "choot spa" made the news recently. She is hardly the first to make this mistake. In "Onward and upward: a biography of Katharine S. White," by Linda H. Davis (pg. 3) we see that S.N. Behrman always called White "Madame C." It seems the genesis of this nickname came about in 1954 when she mispronounced "the Yiddish colloquialism chutzpah, which the usually correct [New Yorker] editor called "chootsbah." White herself recalled that "It tickled Sam [Behrman] pink and he later told me I was known all over Broadway as Mme. C."

Regarding chutzpah, in a review essay of several books on and about the Jews in an 1896 issue of the Quarterly Review, called The Modern Jews, we read the following:

The Berlin salons, though never equal to the French in wit or politeness, soon gained a reputation; it was chiefly in them that the peculiar effluence called 'Geist' might be discerned. For this kind of light sarcastic humour, smart but superficial, and manufactured every day according to a recipe which is simple enough when stated, the fashionable Jew has always shown his aptitude. We cannot overlook it in Disraeli's novels; and French writers like Drumont confess with a sigh that the young Hebrew of the 'Gaulois' or the 'Figaro' is, in this respect, more Parisian than the Parisians themselves. Its native name is chutzbah, or—to translate very mildly—' self-confidence.' Schopenhauer has remarked, with his usual acuteness, that there is one quality which is conspicuous by its absence from the Jewish character,—it is verecundia, modesty, the shy feeling which in true genius resembles the blush on a maiden's cheek, and heightens the grace that it seems to render uncertain. Compare, from this point of view, Shelley's or even Shakespeare's lyric verse with Heine's,—and yet Heine, in the ' Buch der Lieder,' is supreme among the New-Hebrew singers. But he is never diffident, not in the most troubled or the most passionate hour of his serenading. And his prose, with its Oriental richness, its epigrams, its lightning-flashes, abounds in chutzbah; it has the insolence of a parvenu that has ' arrived,' not by reason of his wealth, but thanks to his undeniable gifts of genius.

The modern reader is no doubt perplexed by such passages. What is wrong with "self-confidence?" Or "undeniable gifts of genius?" The writer also states that "It has taken some thirty centuries to make the modern Jew. Will it take fewer to unmake him? Jacob reforms his Liturgy in Hamburg and New York; but himself neither he, nor we, can reform."