Shizzle me this

September 6th, 2005

“What’s a shizzle?” David asks.

“You know. Shizzle. Hipsterspeak,” I say. “It’s like pig Latin. Or that Ubby-Wubby talk they do on Zoom. ‘Sleep’ would be, I don’t know, shleepzizzle. Or shizzeeple. Shizzleep? Crap, I can’t do it. I can’t shizzle.”

“Shizzle is something my Zaida would say,” says David. “Oy vey, where the kaetzle is my shizzle? You know I only eat my matzoah with a nice schmear of shizzle.” He is amusing himself very much. I wait until he is quite through.

“Um, I think it means more like, you know, something’s the bomb.”

“What bomb?”

I sigh. I remind myself who I am dealing with, a man who once voiced his support for a suggested group activity by cheerfully exclaiming, “Great! I’m going down on that!”

“Da bomb,” I say.

“Huh?”

“You know,” I say. “Da bomb. It’s da bomb. It’s da shit.”

“What’s ’shit’ in German?” David asks.

“Scheisse,” I say. This, and ich habe zwei Hund and er ist eben der Beste in der Hund-Klasse and er spielt gut Frisbee are all that remains from my year of German 101. Still, I can conjugate German better than shizzle. “Definitely scheisse.”

“Ah,” says David, nodding sagely. “Scheisse. Of course. It’s halfway there.”

“Halfway where?”

“Halfway to shizzle. What’s ’shit’ in Yiddish? It’s GOT to be shizzle.” he says. He shifts gears. “Wait, does that guy actually say ’shizzle’ on TV?”

“You mean the golf commercial? With Snoop Dogg and the old guy?”

“Yes.”

“I think it’s okay to say shizzle on TV. It’s like bee-yotch,” I say.

David squints at me. “What’s bee-yotch? That sounds Brazilian. Is that Ebonics?”

“Um, I don’t think they call it Ebonics anymore,” I say nervously, looking around to see if anyone has heard us. We are in our car, alone.

“What do they call it?” He is perplexed. “Ebonics isn’t PC? I thought Ebonics was PC.”

“I think Ebonics was so politically correct, it crossed the line back into incorrect,” I say, not at all convinced I have any idea what I am talking about. “But the politically incorrect phrases are correct again, so it all balances out.” I pat his thigh. “You da shizzle.”

“I still say it’s Yiddish.”

*****

Sidebar: It’s all Yiddish to my husband. A few weeks after Hattie was born, David helpfully asked, “Are you doing your Kugels?”

*****

I ask Soph if she knows anything about bee-yotch, in its two-syllable form.

“Bee-yotch means that your heart is great,” she says decisively.

So what’s a shizzle?

“I think it’s a kind of toy. I think it would spin a lot. If it wasn’t a toy, it would be a table.”

She is her father’s daughter. Shizzle’s a dreidel, or a nice place to hold a Seder.

*****

“We’re going to have to look it up,” David finally says. We’ve had shizzle on the brain all weekend. Enough is enough.

The Internet did not disappoint. But I could have used a little chart that says whether or not nerdy white Canadian-Jew boys and nerdy white American girls are authorized to shizzle.

Oy vey. I’m thizzinking, negative. Shizzle Tov.

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized, Play nice! (Politics & Religion), Tattletales. (Mouths of babes)