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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   3484 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 18, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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other than a few scattered examples of the word chutzpah, which of course has equivalents in many languages

«Of course». Well, that's about what I expected.

The late Leo Rosten, author of "The Joys of Yiddish," wrote that chutzpah means "presumption plus arrogance such as no other word, and no other language, can do justice to.

This assertion of exclusivity itself sounds like chutzpah, ironically, but I'd rather believe this expert than you. Very many words do not have exact equivalents in other languages, and there are such words which do communicate a great deal about the culture and are only properly interpretable in its context – usually according to native speakers. For example, according to Vladimir Nabokov, «No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause...». An argument can be made that it's just depression plus a bit of narcissism, but that in itself communicates an important shade of Russianness (expressed both in our literature and suicide rates). Grozny, too, does not have an «equivalent» in modern English (but is evident in the Russian attitude to command chains).

Nor does chutzpah. Sapir-Whorf is wrong because it confuses cause and effect: much like evolution increases the density and diversity of receptors most vital for the species, a language develops finer distinctions to address things most relevant in the people's cultural and ecological environment. You know, Inuits have a trillion words for snow. Swedes have their Lagom – and their perfect taste. Jews have a ton of concepts that others have either not grasped at all, or found novel. Why do you think loanwords even exist – because they sound cool? Because native speakers narcissistically claim they mean something special?

I don't seen any argument that chutzpah is special

Except all arguments made by all Jews who've ever written on the topic, I suppose, starting with Rabbinical scholars cited in Wikipedia. Do you assert, say, that Catholics recognize the right of an individual to haggle with God? Do you not see how that is different from «courage, mettle or ardor» some Gentiles assume «chutzpah» refers to?

Or consider Bernar-Henry Levi, «The Genius of Judaism», speaking audaciously of what I believe can be seen as the intellectual foundation of chutzpah:

The idea of the wager, the sublime leap into the unknown of a Pascal who, tired of flitting between the computation of probabilities, pleasant diversions, and the silence of infinite space, decides to scale the wall toward the sound of the voices that he hears sighing in the shadows, to go faster than the music of the spheres though he is resigned to never knowing their ultimate secret, and even to travel beyond the light of the most powerful human understanding (his own) that the century had produced but that, despite its power, understood nothing: his wager took him beyond all that and, in a single bound, propelled him to the summit of creation and its end. But what could be more different from a Talmudic effort that never offers itself freebies, that skips no steps or rungs on the ladder, that forgoes no audacity of thought and will be satisfied with itself only once it has arrived at the end of the end of what it can think (not believe, but think)?

You pooh-pooh my examples. Care to show how they are unrepresentative, or point to a qualitative study of some rigorously defined form of chutzpah per religion or ancestry, say, comparison in rates of complex swindles and heists and exploits, adjusted for SES, perhaps? (Who would even have the boldness – if not chutzpah – to propose it?)

Look, this is very boring. I get it: Jews can be casually discussed as being special in positive ways, both well-evidenced and speculative (IQ, talents, «work ethic»), but cannot be special in negative ways (except ones that are compliments in disguise, like «excessively curious» or «too much empathy»). This is one of the cornerstones of Western culture, and all opposition to it is supposed to be defended with the rigor of a philosophical treatise, lest it be taken as evidence of a severe moral defect; while its affirmation can be as intellectually lazy as yours. «Of course there are equivalents».

But I'm not a Westerner and feel entitled to point out the obvious. There aren't.

would a non-Jewish fraudster like Frank Abagnale be a truffatore in the Italian tradition

Maybe he would. I, for one, agree that chutzpah, understood in line with my posts, is the correct term with which to label his actions. Or rather, the stuff he has asserted he had done, but apparently did not. Lying about being a cool sexy clever fraudster (but a harmless one! All victimless, baby!) to get book contracts, on the other hand, is not chutzpah – it's just, like, sad. It's telling that you have not reached for a less controversial example.

I'm curious now, do you even have any? Something on par with Soros or Madoff or Epstein or SBF or Bibi's scheming, if possible. Do provide it, before you leave.

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