The Zeitgeist
Despite the column inches that this paper lavishes on them, hacks are rarely actually very interesting. This week, however, I discovered something that renders the concept, if not the people themselves, quite interesting. As with most near-epiphanous moments, it came from a most unexpected source: a book on the history of Yiddish. One particular phrase stuck in my mind “Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik” (Literally: Don’t knock me a teakettle).
The phrase comes from the sound the flapping lid of an almost empty kettle makes when most of the water boils away; the emptier the kettle, the louder the noise. A more accurate translation would be: ‘You do not have to shut up completely but I would appreciate it if you stopped bothering me about the same thing over and over again’, which I think, brings us a little closer to the denizens of Frewin Street.
In the 1970s and 80s, the phrase, or rather the shorthand version of it (‘hak’ or ‘huk’) became part of American legal argot and was used on an almost weekly basis in the TV series, LA Law. The term even started to be used in a political context; the infamous strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 Election campaign, James Carvill, was sometimes referred to as a ‘Hukker’ or as the ‘Hak’.
The OED confirms that none of the many usages of hack came closer to the meaning of the word in its University context. That is not to say that my etymology is right, but you cannot deny its interest. As with so much of Yiddish, the metaphor, perhaps like my etymology, represents a remarkable leap of imagination. This imagination is paticularly clearly seen in the curse, “Lign in dr’erd un bakn beygl”.
It means that the curse’s victim should die and be forced to bake bagels, because if it was not bad enough being dead, you now have to spend eternity in hellishly hot bakery conditions, baking bagels that, being dead, you cannot eat. (Although G&D’s might be interested.) This article is not intended to encourage people to go and learn Yiddish (believe me there are much, much better things to do), rather enjoy the sheer imagination of it and to sit back and do nothing.
Serendipity is apleasure that involves doing nothing in particular, and, as I hope this article shows, its pleasures can come from, unsurprisingly, the most unexpected sources.
2nd Nov 2006