Translatable but Debatable – נמאס nim'as
/by Mark L. Levinson
I was listening to a pop music program on the radio some years ago and the dj announced it was time for פינת הפזמון המאוס (Peenat ha-Pizmon ha-Ma’oos). I don’t know what an English-speaking announcer would call a peenah. Literally it’s a corner, but here it means a little program within a program. It’s a “feature,” a “segment,” a “spot.” But is any of those a word that you’d use in announcing it? I’m not sure.
A pizmon ma’oos would be a song that, whether we once liked it or never liked it, we’ve heard again and again till the very familiarity of it has become an irritation. The dj said he’d received a letter saying “I’m a loyal listener, and if you’d like to do me a favor, please do not play Paul Anka singing ‘Diana.’ Play anything else.” So of course the dj put on Paul Anka singing “Diana.”
Merriam-Webster approves the word “warhorse” for “something (such as a work of art or musical composition) that has become overly familiar or hackneyed due to much repetition in the standard repertoire.” Okay, but not everything that has become ma’oos — in the sense of having worn out its welcome, or never being very welcome but persisting anyway — is a warhorse. For example, my wife wishes I’d stop wearing my Israel National Trail tee shirt as my first choice, but that doesn’t make it a warhorse.
The root for the word ma’oos, and for the more frequently heard form נמאס nim’as, goes back to the Bible. In Amos 5:21, for example, we have
שָׂנֵאתִי מָאַסְתִּי חַגֵּיכֶם
King James translates that as “I hate, I despise your feast days,” and other translations use words like “loathe” and “reject,” but they don’t carry the idea that being ma’oos is something that comes about with the passage of time. It’s not as if the Lord is grumpy about receiving the same old burnt offerings holiday after holiday.
The dictionaries too — at least those I have at hand — give little attention to the connotation of lengthy overfamiliarity. The big Alcalay Hebrew-to-English dictionary says that that the verb ma’as is “to hate, abhor, detest, despise, reject, refuse” and a thing that is ma’oos is “abominable, loathsome contemptible, repulsive, despicable.” It includes the expression מוקצה מחמת מיאוס, muktseh mikhamat mi’us, translated as “not to be touched because of its loathsomeness; not to be touched with a pair of tongs; I would not touch it with a barge pole.”
But the Jastrow Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, which says that something מאיס ma’ees is sticky, soiled; or repulsive, does say that the verb ma'as means “to be tired of” as well as “to loathe; to cast away, reject,” and for a “tired of” example it quotes the Talmud: “The Lord never tires of the prayer of assemblies.”
The commonly heard form, nim’as — very commonly heard indeed, and I gave up scrolling through the examples at Reverso.net after a thousand or more — is defined by Ben Yehuda & Weinstein as “to be despised; to feel disgusted,” which amounts to two different ways of applying the verb. The more straightforward way is to say that the thing is despised. But more often we hear the verb with a person as indirect object, and that’s the person who doesn’t like the thing. Thus Dov Ben Abba’s dictionary includes nim’as li with the definition “I’m sick of...” Ya’acov Levy’s Oxford dictionary includes nima’as lo (using “him”) as “fed up.”
Tired of, sick of, fed up with. Interestingly, these are all dead metaphors. People who shout that they’re sick and tired of something can of course be perfectly healthy and energetic. And if they’re fed up with something, it doesn’t mean they’ve eaten it.
The nim’as examples at Reverso.net, from a corpus largely based on movie and TV subtitles, include some slangy alternatives. There’s “had it” or “had it up to here,” as in “I’ve had it up to here with your high-mindedness.” And there’s “over,” as in “I’m so over this place” and “I’m over your patronizing tone, okay?” I think that’s a recent usage; I don’t remember it from when I was young.
And speaking of getting old, “getting old” is another way of saying nim’as about something. Reverso has “Are you gonna keep this up ...? Because it got old hours ago” and “You've been doing it since kindergarten, and it's getting old.”
Reverso also has “tiresome,” which can be a good translation. Some things become tiresome, although others are tiresome from the moment they start. “Boring” is somewhat the same.
Not a single source gave me “pall,” although Merriam-Webster defines it as “to lose in interest or attraction” and gives examples: “his humor began to pall on us” and “He found that his retirement hobbies began to pall after a couple of years.” Maybe because “pall” took a drop in popularity a couple of hundred years ago. (So says the ngram, at least.)
Please leave a remark in the space below if you have good translations of nim’as, especially if they’re not dead metaphors or slang, and especially if they’re applied to the thing that’s become disliked and not to the person doing the disliking. And for that matter, more translations of peenah, meaning a regular segment of a TV or radio show, would also be appreciated. Further comments are welcome too, if relevant to the discussion above; other comments, such as suggestions for words to discuss in the future, may be sent to whystyle@elephant.org.il.
