American English intonation (unlike British English) is not characterized by steep rises and falls. However, there is one case where a rise is followed by a significant fall, and that is in enumerations, e.g., “Moishe wants the jump suit, the aviator glasses, the parachute all to be the best.” The intonation curve of all three enumerated objects first rises and then markedly falls. This is an entirely un-Anglo-Saxon pattern, but it can be heard increasingly often emanating from the mouths of decidedly gentile speakers utterly oblivious of the intonation’s origin. It owes its existence to Yiddish (ultimately from Slavic, namely Russian) and can be added to lexical importations (meshugge, shlep, mamzer, etc.) that have been registered by normative dictionaries as borrowed from Yiddish and now belonging to the stock of English vocabulary. This we needed like a lokh n kop!

MICHAEL SHAPIRO