"alter cocker"...German cognate

[Jon Ford]

James-- well, I give up on this one. My reliable source  on "alte kacher" 
was some on-line dictionaries I read and my old friend Roy Glassberg, who 
holds a  double PhD in Drama and English as a Second Language, and who grew 
up in Brooklyn with a lot of Yiddish spoken in his home. Yet, the more I 
look into spellings, the more varieties of the term I get-- most recently I 
saw "alte kucher" listed as a "very derogatory" term for an old man--I'd 
love to know just what "kucher" means in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, or 
whatever. Let's just call a truce--Mike can call anybody he wants an "alter 
cocker" if he wants--I don't  really care that much-- I was just kidding 
around to start with.

Jon


>From: James Holland <jhollnd@swbell.net>
>To: austin-ghetto-list@pairlist.net
>Subject: Re: "alter cocker"...German cognate
>Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 11:51:33 -0500
>
>
>In German  "alter Knacker" is a disparaging term for somebody old, usually
>male, nothing to do with "caca."  If it has that association in Yiddish 
>it's
>an interesting example of false etymology.  "Knacken" means "crack", or
>"break", more or less.  Old fragile bones?  Seems to have more to do with
>physical than mental infirmity.  While I'm on this roll, another 
>interesting
>G-Y shift is that in German a "Schlamassel" is not the person who gets
>thrown up on at a party, it's the party itself where all this throwing up 
>is
>taking place.  Be interesting to track down some others.  I managed to chat
>with a fresh off the plane Polish Hasid in an L.A. laundromat speaking the
>different languages one time.  When he used a word I couldn't understand I
>was able to grasp the explanation.  Of course we weren't discussing the
>latest developments in postmodernist criticism, or how to replace the
>transmission fluid.
>
>Hans sits in his Berlin digs surrounded by reference materials and will
>undoubtedly give us all the definitive explanation.
>
>Jim H.
>
>
>
>


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