Bupkis Legal Meaning
I deal with immigration policy, but again, she had absolutely nothing to do, zip, nada, bupkis to do with SB1070 and until the day she signed it, no one knew if she would. And bonds pay Bupkis: Right now, the Vanguard Bond Index Fund, a mix of Treasuries and companies, yields just 2.3%. Maybe it was that last boring thought that set him up. And as incredible as it was, even for him, he managed a smile and a thank you. Thank you for what? he wondered. For bupkis, for goats (“Excuse me, children”), that`s why. But very few modern writers who use the term casually seem to be aware of this etymological connection. A Google Books search finds only one case in which a novelist explicitly treats Bupkis as an abbreviated form of Kozebubkes. From Stella Suberman, The Jew Store (2001): As I said, I`m not familiar with bupkis on extra chromosomes or autosomal disorders, but I know this little girl once had a fucking fight.
[US Viewer] Bupkes means “nothing”, okay, but it`s a kind of nothing quite specific, quite different from gornisht, the Yiddish dictionary for “nothing”, as “nothing” itself is “sweet fuck-all”. The basic meaning of bupkes, which is spelled and pronounced in the official klal-shprakh [standard Yiddish], is manure, especially manure from sheep and goats. Like the English “bullshit” or “horseshit”, Bupkes was once quite common as an expression of disbelief. A response from Bupkes meant that you thought someone was saying nonsense; Whatever he said, it was crap. Like so many Yiddish who found his way into English, Bupkes was demoted from vulgar to cute; but if you didn`t talk about barn waste, you`d try to avoid the word in polite Yiddish conversations. Since I am very familiar with Bupkis in the science of lawn management, I usually stick to non-agronomic topics. [Golf Course Industry Magazine] On the other hand, we have two examples in which a memorialist remembers a grandmother who uses a form of the term Bupkis, which the author translates as “beans”. Excerpt from Edward Cohen, The Peddler`s Grandson: Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi (1999): bupkes; The name bupki has used nothing to express shoring to something considered stupid or trivial us, 1942 From Russian to “beans”.â Claims about an essential etymological link between Bupkis and Kozebubkes are the most common in reference works of the last thirty years or so. For example, from Yetta Emmes, Drek!: The Real Yiddish Your Bubbeh Never Taught You (1998): The goal is to make an “all or nothing” case, and most of the time Kobe received Bupkis. [ESPN] TV Guide Magazine: The situation seemed to get worse in June because of Maria herself at the Emmys, when she assured us in the press room that you would be back – but several months of bupkis followed. 1942 A.J. Liebling Indian 60 Phone booth The best thing you can find there is the opportunity to work Saturday night in a broken saloon for Bupkis.
Presumably, if Poppycock had retained even a hint of the meaning of the source word “soft feces,” ConAgra Foods would not have chosen it as the brand name for a range of candied popcorn. Similarly, it seems to me that Yiddish-speaking street vendors at the turn of the twentieth century did not freely use bubkes to promote their products, and Yiddish-speaking grandmothers in the mid-twentieth century would not have used the same term in conversations with their grandchildren, unless the term only means “beans” to them. As for the meaning of Bupkes in Yiddish, several sources have fairly accurate opinions. From Abbott J. Liebling, The Wayward Pressman (1947) [Detail]: The word you are looking for is not a butkis. It is bupkes (also spelled bubkis, bupkis and bubkes), which is Yiddish for “beans” or, figuratively speaking, “nothing, nada, zilch”. But there`s more to Bupkes than just “nothing.” For example, if you say that you got bupkes from a deal you negotiated, it really means that you didn`t get anything if you should at least have gotten something, if there was justice in this world. All this is a lot to say for a word, but Yiddish is good at it. How could anyone look so deeply into the heart of biological causality and the history of life and then offer us as confusing a dribble as my grandmother would have said, about the meaning of life and the final order of things. What it has to do with MoveOn or the First Amendment is this: Bupkis. Bobkes.
In Yiddish, this word is an interjection meaning “garbage! Nonsense! “, derived from Bobke, which means “sheep or goat manure”. The word was borrowed from the Polish name bobki, of the same meaning. Nevertheless, many have confused this word with the Yiddish words for beans, bobes, a confusion that has led Jewish English speakers to equate bobkes with the use of American English slang of “beans,” as in He don`t know beans (attested in English since 1833), and I don`t care about beans. So, phrases like “I have bobkes for all my efforts,” “He made bobkes on the market this year, and “even if you win the lawsuit, the damages you get will be worth bobkes” are examples of English Jewish usage ..] For those of us who earn little enough that the standard deduction always exceeds all possible individual deductions, additional tax credits are absolutely worth Bupkis. But it was his ex-wife who, although she was able to get bupkis from the estate, gave the most priceless post citation of all. [New York Magazine] Forms: 19– Bobkes, 19– Bobkis, 19– Bopkes, 19– Bopkus, 19– Bubkes, 19– Bubkess, 19– Bubkiss, 19– Bubkiss, 19– Bupkes, 19– Bupkis, 19– Bupkiss, 19– Bupkus. It is a pejorative term that means worthless as goat. See MW. The word has a lot of spellings, but the usual one is “Bupkis”. It is of Yiddish origin and was first used in the English language in 1937. Many people pointed to the irony of Sunday`s Snow Potential Index (SPI), which said, “0 (→) – Nada, naught, zip, zilch, goose egg, bupkis, should I continue?” when the snowflakes fell. The word is sometimes spelled Bupkes, Bubkiss and Bubkes (and there might be other spellings we miss).
Dictionaries differ in this regard; For example, the Oxford English Dictionary lists Bupkis, the American Heritage Dictionary lists Bupkis as the primary spelling and Bupkes as the secondary spelling,2, and Merriam-Webster lists bubkes as the primary spelling.3 Our Microsoft Word spell checker does not endorse any of them. But we go with Bupkis because it is by far the most common spelling on the Internet and in 21st century books. “The Urban Dictionary,” which is not as reliable as “The Oxford English Dictionary,” suggests that the Yiddish word originally referred to a type of bean. The bean had the shape of the “feces” of goats. So, some people say that bupkis means “goat”. Today it was dark all morning, the kind of severe and menacing darkness that usually means shooting down hatches, but so far Bupkis. The earlier connotation for bubkes, as described by Wex, seems to fit better with the 1928 example: “What did it do for him – all those bubkes.” While it would be helpful to have more context than the Google Books snippet, the meaningless/meaningless or can work better here than nothing.