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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Not that I have to be first. But I tried to link it in "cognate" and it wasn't linked yet!
The funny thing is that Mom would say "Oy vey" all the time when I was a kid. Mom as in most-of-my-ancestors-are-Scottish Mom. And never did I hear it from her sister-in...in what, after a separation? (See "Mensa" for the uncle she split up with).
Cognates and borrowings. I borrow an aunt. But, despite living nearby, she's pretty self-contained, busy with various jobs and volunteer jobs and bicycle activism. So who knows if she said it when I wasn't around? But maybe she thought it was a cliché or old-lady thing to say. Too much like her mom? I dunno, but Bubbe could speak the language as a whole. Bubbe meaning Lia's grandma, not mine. But I always thought of her as "Bubbe" by transitive property, like Livingstone's Ghanaian church ladies gaining universal or at least community-wide aunthood: Auntie Rose, Auntie Thelma, Auntie Adelaide.
Culture by proxy. What's the Gaelic word for grandma? Hmmm? Scots, then? Okay, on Dad's side, Dutch or Irish or whatever else he is besides English and French?
Dunno, dunno, dunno, dunno. It's sad when a language dies with its user(s), even in a contained local setting - Bubbe-not-Auntie Rose died a few years ago. But if it's several generations ago, I'm more "meh" (that's Irish, I say; it was in Ulysses). I mean, I don't have a burning desire to learn Gaelic like my brother was doing. And that's fine - it can be his thing (sibling rivalry dies hard sometimes).
Ah. But Mom does have a Scots expression, passed down from her mother: "Sit ye doon."
Debra to Lia, years ago, several times: "Sit like a mensch." ("Like a person," but more like, sit properly; don't squirm.)
Sit ye doon like a mensch and fucking FOCUS, Kirstenblob. You're farther off topic than a cactus in Antarctica. Oy vey, by the fractional equivalent.
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