DAVID L. GOLD'S ENGLISH, JEWISH AND OTHER ETYMOLOGIES ...

DAVID L. GOLD’S ETYMOLOGIES 189tact” with Ladislav Zgusta “for about fifteen years” and “[t]he present article isdistilled” (p. 609) from these letters.Apart from words that could be etymologically explained here, there arealso some mysterious cases. One of them is the fact that two Hebrew nameswith a word initial ayin are differently rendered in the Czech Bible: Híra synIk š where either *Híra syn Hik š or *Íra syn Ik š should be expected. Unfortunately,no solution is offered in this article.The idea that Czech k ťas ‘black-marketeer’ is possibly a corrupted reflexof Polish kutas ‘1. tassel > 2. vulg. penis > 3. vulg. arrogant jerk, swine, prick’ 19does not look really convincing (what about the phonetics?). If this, however,were the case, the word would have had a very interesting semantic history:Czech k ťas ‘black-marketeer’ < Polish kutas ‘prick, jerk < penis < tassel’ Yiddish *maline-shmaline > Czech šm liná(as Gold puts it on p. 619). – Some objections: [α] the construct *malineshmalineis not known in Yiddish (otherwise Gold would not have put the192021It is a curious coincidence that another word for ‘prick’, namely Yiddish shmok (