h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

And I thought 'The Thoughts of Chairman Miaow' was just a bad pun.

My favourite word is Nebbish.

I discovered it in a Hammond Innes Novel, Doomed Oasis I think. It means the 'Grey man' or invisible man, and I often feel I am he when ordering a beer, or standing in a queue, and even more so since becoming disabled.

The other is Nevern. A word that occurs in fantasy novels. The no name man, maybe also another term, or corruption, for Nebbish?

Any one else come across these?

MMF

I thought a nebbish was a sad sack, a sorry soul who never got much respect or notice. Schlemiel is sort of similar, I guess.

I remember the Grey Man from a science fiction story but I don't think the word nebbish was used

Nebbish is Yiddish, and it probably comes from a Czech word.

As Yiddish speakers use it, a nebbish is a sort of pitiful person - the kind who's clumsy, unintelligent and timid all at the same time.

Yiddish is a terrible language for judging other people in a nuanced way. Most Yiddish speakers will tell you that there are gradations between nebbish, schlemiel, and schlemazel.

Basically, a nebbish is this person who picks up what the schlemiel knocks down. A schlemiel will spill the soup - but the schlemazel is the person he spills it on. You pity the nebbish but dislike the schlemiel. Early Woody Allen films portray a nebbish. And so forth.

From this I conclude that Yiddish was always a language used by a very social people who were analytical about the connection between personality and worldly success in a way that would have been alien to my forebears.

Here's a cartoon and article about nebbishes, if you're interested, from a website called 'The Tablet'.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/90124/helpless

Thanks for the link, Dmitri. Kirk Douglas and Olivia de Havilland [both still alive at 99 years of age] are the last survivors of the old Hollywood. I never thought of Kirk as a nebbish, but more power to him.

I think the idea was that Kirk Douglas wasn't a nebbish, Paul - a more 'manly' Jewish image.

I always thought he should have used his real name, though - Issur Danielovitch has a ring to it.

he still could -- he's going to be 100 next December -- though few people would notice or care at this point.

Nebbish Neven... He's a real nowhere man

I was thrown in the first line of that article by the expression "coffee table". OK it's a table, and they're drinking coffee, but a coffee table is surely a low-slung table plonked in front of the settee where you keep magazines and maybe a pot plant, and put your feet up on when no one is looking.

New York City has its own language, I guess.

The table that they're sitting in seems to be located in a restaurant or coffee shop. But, you're right that that doesn't to be a coffee table, strictly speaking.