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Sunday, December 07, 2014

A Great Nebesh Happened There




My mind is spinning like a dreidel...

When I wrote the post yesterday about Chanute, Kansas, and the municipal endeavor creating their own broadband system, I titled it:

Chanute, Kansas ! Huzzah ! 



Now every time I see it fly by me as I edit, I wonder

(1) is it Hannukah yet?  (I pronounce the word with a hard "ch" sound as in the Scottish "loch", and that is usually transliterated as Channukah)  so it's the "Chan-" in "Chanute" that misleads me.

and

(2) I think of Eddie Cantor singing "That Old Sultan's Harem".
"Cantor" in Hebrew is Chazzan  (sometimes chazzin), and it is the "ch" and the "-zz-" in "huzzah" that beguile.

As an aside, the letters of the dreidel spinning toy are Nun, Gimmel, Hey, and Shin - n,g,h,sh - and their symbolism is as follows:

sh = sham = "there"

h = haya = "happened"

g = gadol = "large, great"

n = nebesh = nebesh 

and there is some doggerel like "nebesh gadol haya sham", or an approximation to the title.
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