Friday, April 11, 2008

Daily Targum?!?

OK, in a standard online ping-pong surf, I was looking at Spencer Ackerman's catty blog (and his attacks on familiar names from the New Republic) and I wanted to see why he was fired from the TNR (his own claim is because his life appears to be a chapter in a punk soap-opera). Anyhoo, the Wiki page on Ackerman says that he went to Rutgers and was the editor of their newspaper, the Daily Targum.

Now 'targum' sounds like a familiar word. But maybe it's the name of the founder or something. Nope; according to the wiki:
1866: Then Rutgers President William H. Campbell lectures to Rutgers men on the original text of the Old Testament, including Aramaic language paraphrases of the Hebrew Scriptures, called Targums. The word "Targum" means interpretation in Aramaic and is used as a slang word when referring to crib sheets, among various Aramaic terms that become part of the campus vernacular. This is the inspiration for the name of the forthcoming periodical.
Now, I thought it was weird that Yale has Hebrew on it's logo, but it's not named for an actual Hebrew word ("the Fighting Thummims" or something). The Rutgers paper is the case I know of where a non-Jewish entity is named for an overtly religious-Hebrew term that has not been before or since co-opted as a Christian term.

E.g. Shibboleth, Halleluyah, Amen are all Hebrew words taken into English through Christianity. But 'targum.' Maybe other people know about this already, but I found it weird.

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