s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

98
Michael Hornsby
[3]
Will: “Thank you. That was perfect timing.”
Grace: “I don’t have to be doing this.”
Will: “Oh really? Really, well, you know, I didn’t have to spend Labor Day with your aunt
Marsha in Boca Ratón, not that I didn’t love the yarn fayre. But I could have done without
half the the condo complex pointing at me and whispering, ‘So that’s the faygeleh’.”
“Faygele”
The use of the Yiddish word for a gay man (faygele, lit. ‘little bird’), said in
an exaggerated ‘Jewish’ accent can be used by one New Yorker to another with
no offence intended or taken (depending on the context, obviously) because the
use of Yiddish crosses ethnic lines, in very much the same way described by
Carmen Fought (2006: 197) as “language crossing”, i.e., using a speech variety
associated with a group other than the one you belong to.
Particularly from a power differential perspective, the use of a term in a language
that traditionally was not viewed prestigiously to denote a member of
society who was also not viewed prestigiously (i.e., a faygele, or gay man)
denotes, I would suggest, an attempt at solidarity between two (formerly) oppressed
groups: the Jews and the gay community. It is used here, obviously, for
comic effect, but a very different effect might be imagined should the term have
been used directly toward the character in question by a Yiddish speaker.
Again, context is all.
3.4. Who stands to gain or lose?
The extracts, from [1] to [3], though brief, reveal much about the use of
Yiddish for comic effect, particularly from a power differential viewpoint, as
pointed out in 3b. When answering the critical sociolinguistic question who
stands to gain or lose, we can see that using Yiddish in such a way is not haphazard
– a deliberate effect is aimed at. These include the continuation of a historical
tradition of Jewish/Yiddish comedy or, as Neal Karlen reveals, the inheritance
of “old-world Yiddish badchen, the funniest wise men of the shetl”
(2008: 286). However, this tradition has not been pursued solely in Jewish circles
in America, and gains also include a greater inclusivity – the use of Yiddish
by and for the entertainment of non-Jews in particular recalls one comedian’s
statement that humour is universal. What is more, Karlen 2008: 287) cites one
of the Jewish comic saying: “We [Jewish comics in America] expand it to include
the whole society”. From a specific linguistic point of view, the use of
Yiddish does not impede the flow of the comic routine or script but in fact adds
to it, even though the vast majority of audience members and viewers are in fact
non-Yiddish speakers. As Shandler (2006: 141) points out, it draws audiences
together, particularly “at the symbolic level, invoking an erstwhile shared ethnic