Apparently there has been a "big tsimmis" (I've always loved that word!) about Jane Austen's books being "heavily edited." Here is an NPR report by Geoff Nunberg: Link, and here is a post on Language Log: Link.
I agree with Geoff Nunberg:
quote:
And looking at those manuscripts, I had a hard time figuring out what the problem was. There are some careless errors, but these are rough drafts, and you can't take off points for something that hasn't been handed in yet. And by the standards of the time, she wasn't a bad speller. She was inconsistent about possessives, and she sometimes put e before i in words like believe and friendship, but you can find the same thing in the manuscripts of Byron and Scott and Thomas Jefferson — the rules just weren't settled yet.
there has been a "big tsimmis" [...] about Jane Austen's books being "heavily edited."
Yiddish צימעס (tsimes, link) is a stew of mixed vegetables and dried fruits.
quote:
To make a big tzimmes over something" is a Yinglish expression that means to make a big fuss, perhaps because of all the slicing, mixing and stirring that go into the preparation of the dish.
Yeah, but then, as Languagehat recently said on another board, "[reproaching anyone with spelling mistakes] is not something I do, since I don’t consider spelling a sign of intelligence or morality."
There are a lot of spelling variants for it. One way isn't the only way.
I was not correcting your spelling of tsimes, K. Personally, when I spell Yiddish words, I use the "official" YIVO (link) transcription scheme and orthography. There's some big variations in Yiddish (the main two current dialects being the Lithuanian and the Polish). When it comes to words that have become naturalized in English, it's anybody's guess.
It's like Hanukkah that way, which has about 10 different spellings.
FWIW, my Languagehat quote was aimed at the critics of Austen's punctuation, and not your spelling, but,perhaps, I should write more clear.
