‘Nu, nu, nu, nu’ Nu?

By Dan Bloom

CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Like most people familiar with Yiddish, even people who are second or third or fourth generation non-Yiddish speakers, I know what “nu”means, nu?

But it turns out that there’s more to “nu” than I knew. A lot more.

Here’s my story for today:

I was minding my own business the other day reading a word-a-day vocabulary newsletter edited by an Indian-American word maven named Anu Garg. Yes, his first name has ‘nu” in it.

The “A Word a Day” newsletter is free and comes out daily five days a week and at the end of very week AWAD subscribers get a chance to comment on any of the previous week’s words that Garg selected for spotlighting.

Well, to make a long story short, one of the words selected the other week was “nu.” And readers had a field day chiming in at the end of the week with fun and funny letters to the editor.

One of the writers was Paula John, a 1956  Antioch College graduate who lives in Florida and at the age of 80 is still full of pep and Yiddishkeit.

“Back in the days before Windows, when a prompt was required to enter the operating system, mine was the only Yiddish-speaking PC in our office,” she told the AWAD newsletter. ”When I booted up and it was ready for me to use, my screen read ‘Nu?’

Intrigued, I wrote to John and asked for some amplification, and in Internet time, she told me and San Diego Jewish World: “My parents spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want us kids  to know what they were talking about, so I have a very rich but peripheral knowledge of ‘nu,’ although my Yiddish skills were enhanced by some high school German-language classes I took,” she said. “My PChad an even more limited vocabulary, consisting solely of the word ‘Nu?’ as my prompt. And I was always disappointed that others who may have seen it over my shoulder never did comment on it.

“Dan, are you old enough to remember MSDOS, Microsoft’s Disk Operating System, when instead of icons one used keystrokes to perform operations? ” John asked me. “The prompt came up after booting and was like Start in the Windows system. I don’t remember too clearly, but I guess one had the option of customizing it, and I added
‘Nu?’ to the flashing ‘ >”or whatever the standard prompt was.

”I am trying to see if the Russian ‘nu’ pre-dates the Yiddish ‘nu,’ or if there is a Hebrew ‘nu’that would pre-date both,” John added.

“My little old Hebrew-to-English dictionary, undated but must be pre-1941, has a nun-aleph with two meanings: ‘half-cooked, undone’ and ‘please! do!’ The latter usage could be it, do you think?”

John also told me that her significant other — “my sweetheart” is how she put it — also has a link to the world of Yiddishkeit.

“His father, Vladimir Heifetz, did the music for an old 1937 American Yiddish film titled ‘Grune Felder’ — ‘Green Fields’ in English — available now on DVD,” she said.

And then came the joke about ”the man whose dog spoke Yiddish.”

I told her I was not so good at punch lines, so I asked for the joke and she sent it to me.

“So  you see this Jewish fellow had a dog who happened to understand Yiddish and he loved to show him off,” John began, adding: ”He says ‘sit’ and the dog sits, he says ‘shake’ and the dog puts out his paw, he says ‘fetch’ and the dog says ‘enough already, I’m all in, I’ve been doing tricks all day, my feet are killing me and I have four of them you know,’ and the guy again says ‘fetch’ and the dog says ‘Oh, fetch! — I thought you said ‘kvetch!'”

It turns out that “nu” in Israel is one of the few Yiddish words that has really caught on there, according to word maven and New Jersey transplant Shoshana Kordova in Tel Aviv.

“You can’t claim to understand Israeli culture without mastering the powerful and multifaceted word ‘nu,’ she wrote in a Ha’aretz newspaper column in 2012.

Spoken once, one of the word’s primary functions is as a prompt,’ Kordova explained, noting: “It serves as both a nudge (‘Nu, are you coming?’) and as a query that relieves the speaker of the burden of actually responding.”

“Nu” does require much adornment, she added, but said the word does demand precise inflection to get across the intended meaning.  If someone tells you, “I went on a date last night,” and you answer “Nu?” you’re probably digging for more information, as in “Do tell” or “And?” But if your tone of resignation is just right, you might be asking “So what?” or sarcastically, “So what’s new about that?”

When using the word ‘nu’ in triplicate, inflection, expression and context can be largely thrown out the window, Kordova explained. “All you really need is a finger. Wagging a pointer finger at a young child while saying, ‘Nu, nu, nu!’ is like a verbal slap on the tuches — an admonishment not to touch the vase from Savta Sarah or grab the toy her sibling is playing with. It basically means, ‘No’ or ‘Don’t do that,’ the Jewish Israeli way.”

And one must adopt a stern frown, to show that the scolding is serious business — even if the disciplinarian act lasts only as long as it takes you to get the three words out of your mouth, she added to make sure readers understood the import of what she was explaining.

Finally, Ira Hammerman in Rehovot, Israel wrote in to the AWAD newsletter with his take on ‘nu,’ noting that he meaning of “nu” depends on the number of repetitions.

Nu, said just once means: “Well”, “So”, What’s up?”

Said two times, as in “nu nu,” means “Get on with it already!”

Intoned three times, as in “nu nu nu” means “Shame on you!”

And said four times, as in“nu nu, nu nu”means ”’You did real bad, kid.”

When I asked Hammerman what the source was for his explanation, he said it came from a “Hebrew Slang” dictionary compiled Dan Ben Amotz and Nativa Ben Yehuda, but available only in Hebrew for now.
Nu?

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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is an inveterate web surfer with a nose for nu’s.  You may comment to him at dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com, or post your comment on this website provided that the rules below are followed.

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