Yonatan Zunger (zunger) wrote,
Yonatan Zunger
zunger

No debate for me...

I missed the debate tonight. Blame it on work, blame it on already having seen the first two (as well as the veep debate) and noticing that they were already repeating themselves pretty thoroughly by the second.

It makes sense; Kerry knew damned well that he won the first, so he kept doing what he was doing. Bush knew that he lost the first, so he corrected and tried to do as well as possible in the second, and in fact improved.

But one week of study can't really make up for being, as they say in Yiddish (forgive my horrible attempt at transliteration) nicht ein grosse chuchen, nicht ein kleiner narr -- neither a great sage nor a small fool. So the second debate was pretty much as expected. From what I've heard, the third debate was much of the same.

Oh well. If it wasn't clear from this post, my mind is pretty much made up, and it has been for a couple of years.
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  • 3 comments

sdragon

October 14 2004, 08:58:16 UTC 11 years ago

Bad Zoot! Naughty naughty Evil Zoot!

It was actually an interesting debate, from a debater's POV. I have to give Bush credit; they put him through the wringer last week. He was actually debating on a high school level. Although he needs to learn the nuances of facial expressions, like not smiling when you opponent talks about bad things happening to the American people (loss of jobs, no health care, getting killed). You really had to listen to what they said.

But luckily, inertia triumphed and people sitll think Kerry did better.

"Nit"-picking

dobrovolets

October 16 2004, 07:39:50 UTC 11 years ago

What you've got there is daytshmerish. It's: Nisht keyn groyser khokhem, nisht keyn kleyner nar. Yiddish does double negatives ("nisht keyn"), the German "nicht" is transformed to "nisht" or "nit," depending on dialect, and most of the vowels are shifted--"ey" instead of the "ay"-spelled-as-"ei", "oy" instead of "o". "Khokhem" is derived from the Hebrew "khakham".

Re: "Nit"-picking

zunger

October 16 2004, 12:42:00 UTC 11 years ago

Thank you for the spelling fix! I could write this in Hebrew characters, but Yiddish isn't something I normally deal with, and I have no idea how to write this in Roman.