yeesh_kabibble epitome of incomprehensibility This is something that my mom says, or used to say when we were kids. "Yeesh" is something I've heard elsewhere, but why the "kabibble"? What is a kabibble?? What do I put in the etymology section of its entry in the Faux-Swearing Dictionary??? I have two theories. 1) It's Fake Yiddish. It doesn't really mean anything, but it's more blibbity than oy_vey, which is real Yiddish. "Blibbity" is when you want to express exasperation in a mix of consonants and vowels, instead of emphasizing either class of sound. Kvetch isn't blibbity because it goes too far the other way: too consonanty. So when one doesn't have a strong Yiddish vocabulary, one has to turn to Fake Yiddish to express blibbity blobberation. 2) The more Christian of our Judeo-Christian Etymologies: it's a slurred version of "Jesus of the Bible." It ranks #2 on the Christian Value Scale, on par with "jeez" and "gosh." Strict Christians will only tolerate words with a Christian Value of 3.14159 (etc.) or more. My mother is fairly conservative on the Canadian Presbyterian Scale, but about middling on the overall Christian Strictness Scale. (Linguistics will be mostly math in the future, and sadly math is Yeesh Kabibble to me. It's gobbledygosh. So I've decided to get out while the going is less mathy, try to write my own humbler biblio and get an additional job. Bibble, biblio, babble. Qu'est-ce que je fais ici? Ich weiss nicht.) 241211 ... e_o_i ...well, colour me partly right, because I googled the thing and it IS Fake Yiddish. Maybe. From the Wikipedia page for "Ish Kabibble": ... In his 1989 autobiography, Bogue explained his stage name, which he took from the lyrics of one of his comedic songs, "Isch ga-bibble." The song derived from a mock-Yiddish expression, "Ische ga bibble?", which was purported to mean "I should worry?", prompting a curious (and perhaps not coincidental) association with the "What, me worry?" motto of Mad Magazine's mascot, Alfred E. Neuman.[citation needed] While this derivation has been widely quoted on the Internet and elsewhere, the expression "ische ga bibble" is not Yiddish and in fact contains no Yiddish words at all. However, there is a Yiddish expression, "nisht gefidlt," meaning "it doesn't matter to me," from which the term "ish kabibble" may derive. ... Why is citation needed for the Mad Magazine mascot motto? ...because it's more what you'd expect from an Anxious Magazine mascot motto. Eh, I'm being silly today. But anyway, the comedian Merwyn Brogue (should've gone with Fake Irish, cléathgraich me thoídhraich) was Ish Kabibble, not Yeesh Kabibble, so there's also the broken_telephone aspect and/or a melding of expressions. I see a few other "yeesh kabibble"s on forums, plus a book called Professor Yish Kabibble in the Curse of the Scruttles, which is a better title than Virginia Woolf in the Time of Trump (see dream_book). 241211 what's it to you? who go blather from