"What do we want!?

More research for ADHD!

When do we want it!?

“Ok, so we could get pizza or go back to my place, 
hey look, a squirrel…”

When I was a kid,  no one was ADD or ADHD--there wasn't even much concern about those exhibiting behaviors of the kind that today would be identified by those terms .  The term more often heard (amongst the jews) was: 

*Shpilkes: (shpill-kiss) literally, pins. Ants in the pants,  impatience. That feeling you have when you can't sit still from anticipation and/or anxiety. As Mike Myer's Linda Richman character would say, when she gets all worked up, "I have shpilkes in my genecktigazoink."  (which is not a real word)

My parents spoke Yiddish (actually a hybrid of Yiddish and German --my father's native tongue) around the house when they wanted to keep the "Kinder" in the dark.

Great Yiddish and Hebrew writers (left to right):
Mendele Moykher Sforim,
Sholem Aleichem, Mordecai (Rabbinowicz) Ben-Ammi,
and Hayyim Nahman Bialik (Odessa, circa 191

But I sussed out a few things and usually the key was in the inflection. 

And in Yiddish, inflection is the key to intent and often in opposition to literal meaning. 

Mordant syntax: "Smart, he isn't." 

Sarcasm through innocuous diction: "Maybe he should try to shoot himself." 

Scorn through reversed word order: "Already you're discouraged?" 

Contempt through affirmation: "My friend, he wants to be." 

Fearful curses enhanced through customized tailoring: "May all your teeth fall out except one, and in that one you have a toothache." 

Derisive dismissal disguised as innocent interrogation: "I should pay him for such good service?" **

Comedian's quip at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival:  "When Jesus went to heaven, wasn’t he essentially just' moving back in with his parents'?"

London Olympics officials revealed that during the games, The World Anti-Doping Agency performed 6,250 tests for 240 banned substances on approx. half of the athletes-- including all medal winners. By the end of the Games, 12 athletes had been expelled for doping irregularities, and 107 were disqualified prior to the beginning of the competition.  No information was revealed however, concerning drug use by those involved in the staging of the closing ceremonies.

Jeepers-creepers, got the heebie-jeebies. Too much helter-skelter with hoity-toity fuddy-duddy mumbo-jumbo. Not to mention the artsy-fartsy namby-pamby airy-fairy hocus-pocus . Tryin to focus on nitty-gritty but all the hanky-panky ain’t makin my boogie-woogie easy-peasy . Boo-hoo is me, so I’ll just willy-nilly make me a super-duper higgledy-piggledy hodge-podge of Rhyming Reduplicatives for an ADHD world.

Sources:

*www.bubbygram.com/yiddishglossary.htm

** Ibid: Slightly altered