GW, hepcat
Rick Vosper
maxrad at mail.cruzio.com
Thu Jul 10 01:50:21 CDT 1997
At 09:55 PM 7/9/97 -0500, you wrote:
>MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu wrote:
>
>>The messuginah mistake fits into this idea of quick portraiture, or maybe
>it's just an error.
>
>What I found amusing about the reactions to my suggestion that it was a
>mistake was the denial that it was an error at all and the tortured attempts
>to make incorrect Yiddish somehow a variant that I was unaware of and
>Pynchon, the goy, knew better.
>
>Well, at least Mascaro agrees that it someone was mistaken -- whether
>"George Washington" or Thomas Pynchon.
Not to shit in the oatmeal (rather like pissing in the Cheerios, I suppose,
but a line honorably stolen from cartoonist Vaughn Bode ), but even my
painfully uneducated ear tumbled to the dread "messuginah mistake" on my
first reading of M&D...and my knowledge of Yiddish is limited to the novels
of Philip Roth and Jerome Weidman.
My assumption at the time (as now) was/is that the error was sufficiently
obvious that it may (or perhaps even "must") have been intentional.
I'm pleased that the flames have died down enough that I might offer this
tiny bit of evidence without prejudice on either side.
--rick
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