Last week, Mosaic’s language columnist, Philologos, took us on a delightful journey into the origins of the word grogger—denoting a noisemaker used on Purim. Now, René Bloch investigates the etymology of another Purim-related word: the Hebrew masekhah, which means “mask.” When and how did this word come to replace the older partsuf, and is it related to the English word and its French, German, and other equivalents? Bloch writes:

Eliezer Ben Yehudah (1858–1922) in his classic dictionary of Hebrew, under the entry for masekhah as “covering,” writes: “Maske; masque; mask. They have begun to use this term in modern times with the meaning of face-hiding, ‘Maske, masque, mask.’”

Masekhah rings suspiciously similar to the English mask, German Maske (with its Yiddish equivalent maske), French “masque” etc., and it seems likely that the biblical term masekhah entered Modern Hebrew with this new meaning, replacing partsuf, because it sounds like the familiar non-Hebrew word—and because there was a similar-sounding biblical word at hand: masekhah, [meaning something cast out of gold].

Notably, the origin of the non-Hebrew word is itself a mystery. . . . No one knows for sure the origins of the word “mask.” Somehow, it continues to escape, playing hide and seek with us, and laughing at all those philologists trying to catch it.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.