In Reply to: Lydia is a "mensch"? posted by Oldtimer on September 27, 2006 at 17:42:48:
Oldtimer:
I always heard it used in a gender non-specific way, meaning that the person was just a good person; period.
This is the first definition I got, from a Yiddish Dictionary (and somehow lost the URL! Oy!):
“Yiddish, human being, mensch, from Middle High German, human being, from Old High German mennisco.]”
Here’s another:
http://www.sbjf.org/sbjco/schmaltz/yiddish_phrases.htm
MENSCH: A person of character. An individual of recognized worth because of noble values or actions.
Here’s one I thought Lydia might think was funny (you’d have to have been reading her comments on the new board at NDN).
It’s by a funny lady at the Christiam Science Monitor:
http://weblogs.csmonitor.com/verbal_energy/2004/06/index.html
To put it another way, I sometimes wish some way coud be found to reclaim "man" as a truly inclusive common-gender noun, rather like "Mensch" in German (see http://dict.leo.org/?search=Mensch&searchLoc=0&relink=on&spellToler=standard§Hdr=on&tableBorder=1&cmpType=relaxed&lang=en).
It's grammatically masculine, which I suppose says something in itself, but it's freely used in reference to women as well as men, and has that solid, sturdy, direct quality that is one of the strengths of both German and English.
"Person," on the other hand, is thought to derive from a Greek term for an actor's mask. Thus a person is fundamentally a projection - a voice coming through a speaking hole. A far cry from our well-grounded "Mensch."
"Spokesman" may sound like a modern term – a more respectable synonym for "spin doctor," perhaps – but actually it goes back to the King James Bible: Jehovah noticed that Moses was wearing out from his labors leading the Children of Israel, and so He had Moses appoint Aaron as his "spokesman." Now that women have taken up this work, albeit not always at the behest of the Deity, aren't they naturally spokeswomen?
http://www.sbjf.org/sbjco/schmaltz/yiddish_phrases.htm
MENSCH: A person of character. An individual of recognized worth because of noble values or actions.
Yep; Lydia’s like that (kudos, Kiddo!)!
‘Later!
OT2