Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff Lauren vogebam here. The Yiddish language has gifted English speakers with some irresistibly punchy words that defy direct translation but are instantly understandable. Schmuck, schmooz, stick, chatsky up, kiss, kluts. The list goes on. Kutzpah is a word that should be in everyone's arsenal if you're not familiar with kotzbah. It's often defined in the dictionary as nerve, gall insolence, arrogance,
and supreme self confidence. But there's a subtle flavored to kotzbah that alludes easy translation into English. The late Leo Raston, author of The Joys of Yiddish, wrote that kutzbah means presumption plus arrogance, such as no other word and no other language can do justice to Kutzpah. Is that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. You might not recognize the word in
print from having heard it. It's spelled c h u t z p a h in Yiddish. The h sound is produced in the back of the throat. In phonics, it's called an unvoiced dorsal velor non syllabant fricative. If you have difficulty making an authentic sound in the back of your throat and sorry, that's the sound I usually try not to make. Into microphones, you can substitute a regular h sound like hutzpah and people will get what
you mean. Yiddish is derived mostly from German and Hebrew, and kutzba can trace its roots back to ancient Hebrew and Aramaic words meaning insolent and impudent, which are definitely negative descriptors, and it's likely that kutzba was mostly seen as a negative quality among Yiddish speakers in Europe, where it was once the everyday language of ten million Ashkenazi
Jewish people. Yiddish is now an endangered language spoken by roughly a hundred and fifty Americans, mostly in Orthodox Jewish communities. But something happened when Yiddish came to America and mixed with the English usage of nerve. If someone has a lot of nerve, it's usually a bad thing. But sometimes it takes a lot of nerve to speak your mind or stand up to a bully, which is a good thing.
The word kotzba pulls off a nifty trick because, on the one hand, it recognizes that someone's behavior is nervy, brazen, or arrogant, but it also tips its cap and respect. Someone with kotzbah isn't ashamed of bending or breaking the rules if it gets them what they want. You might not approve of their behavior, but you respect the koksbah
it took to pull it off. In its definition of kotzbah, Miriam Webster cites a news article about the son of a Nike executive who sells were sneakers, some of which may have been stolen from Nike. Journalist Jeff Manning wrote in The Oregonian his company West Coast Streetwear has figured out how to use technology and kutzbagh to buy hot sneakers in bulk before the rest of the market. It takes kutzbug to sell stolen footwear from your mom's company.
It's illegal, but also kind of cool. Today's episode is based on the article some nerve kutzpah explained on how stuff works dot com, written by Dave Rouse. Brain Stuff is production of i Heeart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com and is produced by Tyler Clang. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Up, kutzpah, kutzpah. Yep, yeah, this is great. This is a really good audio episode.