Cooking and quacking

Terrific spontaneous Hebrew lesson at the supermarket tonight. I was in search of rolled oats to make a pear crumble for Shabbat dinner but could not for the life of me think of the word in Hebrew (I just consulted my dictionary: "shibolet shual," literally "fox wheat"... huh?). I stalked the aisles and finally came upon a bag of something resembling the desired product. I checked the label. Emblazoned across it were Hebrew letters spelling out "kveker organi," and underneath, in English, "Organic Quacker." Aha! I hope it comes from free-range ducks.

The vocab lesson reminded me of my nephew Shai's stuffed animal, a little fellow with the rather literal name "Soft Duck," who generally appreciates this kind of humor. This one's for you, Soft Duck!

Here in Israel one could easily think that all names actually originate in Hebrew and are only later translated into other languages, never the other way around. For example, it turns out that the tickets I just purchased for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (I came all the way from Chicago to Haifa to see them!) are in fact—according to the English portion of the ad—for "Havad Street" (the Hebrew letter "bet" makes either a "b" or a "v" sound). This of course made me think of both the classic Bostonian saying, "Pahk the cah in havahd yahd," and my friend Eugena's mother, who, in her thick Korean accent, scolded Eugena for choosing a little college known as Stanford over the world-renowned "Ha-bah-deh." Then there are all the mistakes resulting from the mixup of "p" and "f" (the letter "peh" serving for both), including my mother's confusion over a Hebrew automotive ad for the Ford Pocus ("Ford has a new model?").

Then there's the newspaper! When I'm really struggling to understand a word in Ha'aretz, that's usually a sign that it's actually English, and most likely has something to do with technology or the blogosphere... yesterday it was "talkback" that had me totally stumped, as well as the verb "le-sames" ("to SMS," of course!). And let's not forget about television. I'm not even gonna start with news interviews, in which the interviewer generally does more talking than the interviewee, whom he consistently interrupts, or the "Meet the Press" type programs, in which a minimum of six pundits yell at each other in unison. I'm talking about scripted television. I recently got hooked on the TV show "be-tipul," the model for the HBO series "In Treatment." At one point I had to stop the DVD and put on the subtitles (also in Hebrew, which didn't help in this case) to decipher Na'ama's troubles with her boyfriend. "What the #&%$* could 'onanof' mean?!" Turns out she was sick and tired of the "on-and-off." Oy vey. Gotta love globalization.