My father, who passed away recently, preserved a word in his memory from his paternal ancestors - l`hakholas. For years, I thought it must be from some obscure Yiddish dialect or argot. It seemed to contain the Hebrew root for "to curse" and this seemed to embody its meaning when my grandfather and his father used the word, "for the cursedness."
Then, a rabbi friend pointed out to me the very close similarity with a word in Aramaic, which he claimed is used in the Babylonian Talmud. In other words, my family`s word was a Europeanization of some talmudic vocabulary for one who makes pointless and needless arguments that have no purpose other than to get others riled up. |
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