Let us sing of rodomont, Sinon, proditomania, and, in particular, grobian.

Before becoming linked to the famous architect who was trying to escape it, the German word mies (rotten) made its way from Hebrew, to Yiddish, to a thieves’ argot called Rotwelsch.

Philologos is quite certain the words of the prayer are in German, not Yiddish. But beyond that?

Which language was patient zero for the old expression, “We’ve been smallpoxed and measled”?

A centuries-old tale of complicated, ambivalent, and, sometimes, covertly intimate relationships between a largely anti-Semitic Christian society and its Jewish minority.

How an original but maddeningly opaque German Jewish intellectual became a thriving academic industry.