After Steve Zeidenberg, our chazan r'vi'i, concluded Shabbat morning services with a song in Yiddish (praised be HaShem for transliteration!), I couldn't help but note this quick piece from The Jewish Chronicle of Great Britain. So, for all those whose Yinglish is woefully lacking, enjoy:
Don’t hock my chinik
28/12/2007
By Rabbi Julian Sinclair
Don’t hock my chinik is one of my favourite Yinglish expressions. I first encountered it in yeshivah where we had a rabbi who would regularly urge us not to hock his chinik about what Rashi said on the Gemara but instead to look at the text of the Talmud itself.
You could also hock someone’s chinik about buying a new sofa, getting your child into the right school, your opinion of the rabbi’s sermons or anything else about which one may take an obsessive, and potentially annoying, interest.
The origin of the expression is the Yiddish phrase, hock mir nicht kein chinik, (or tscheynik) which literally means “don’t bang my tea kettle”. (Some say that chinik is a teacup and the phrase refers to those who stir their tea in an irritating manner. Figuratively it came to mean “don’t get on my nerves” or “stop giving me a headache”. One can readily understand the connection. One of the invaluable Yiddish websites gave a dozen variants of the phrase, but I won’t hock your chiniks by mentioning them all. Chinik is a tea kettle in Russian. One can see in it the word chai, meaning tea. This is related to the English cha, as in “cup of cha” — itself a borrowing from the Mandarin for tea.
You could also hock someone’s chinik about buying a new sofa, getting your child into the right school, your opinion of the rabbi’s sermons or anything else about which one may take an obsessive, and potentially annoying, interest.
The origin of the expression is the Yiddish phrase, hock mir nicht kein chinik, (or tscheynik) which literally means “don’t bang my tea kettle”. (Some say that chinik is a teacup and the phrase refers to those who stir their tea in an irritating manner. Figuratively it came to mean “don’t get on my nerves” or “stop giving me a headache”. One can readily understand the connection. One of the invaluable Yiddish websites gave a dozen variants of the phrase, but I won’t hock your chiniks by mentioning them all. Chinik is a tea kettle in Russian. One can see in it the word chai, meaning tea. This is related to the English cha, as in “cup of cha” — itself a borrowing from the Mandarin for tea.
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