Last week’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me had an interesting item at the beginning of Panel Round Two — they were reporting that there was a new slang verb in Hebrew: “L’Condel”, in honor of Condelezza Rice, meaning to run around and have meetings which produce no results. I thought it was amusing, and I could certainly come up with contexts in which I could use it. But I didn’t know how to properly conjugate it…or even how to spell it, since Hebrew has two letters for the ‘k’ sound. But I did a little Googling and found what seemed to be the original reference, from a November 12th New York Times article.
Later, I was chatting online with a colleague from IBM Israel, and I asked her if she had heard the verb, or how it would be spelled. She hadn’t heard of it. So I decided to Google the two alternative spellings I could come up with, and discovered that there were no hits for ×œ×›× ×“×œ, while ×œ×§× ×“×œ had many. But what was odd was that many of the hits were several years old, which made no sense.
My friend, in the meantime, had done additional research; since she actually speaks Hebrew, she knew that “L’Condel” had to be spelled with an additional vav — ×œ×§×•× ×“×œ — to force the “oh” in “Condelezza”. What I’d found was the prepositional phrase “to Kendall” (as in, “I gave advice to Kendall”) — completely unrelated to my quest.
She could only find one citation in Hebrew on the web, which said that this was a new verb being used among the Israeli administration meaning going in and out of meetings with little said and done.
I clicked through and discovered that the page was the “Daily Alert” from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. I searched for ×œ×§×•× ×“×œ on the page — and interestingly, it was in a paragraph headed “New York Times”.
So I cut-and-pasted the first few sentences of the paragraph into the Hebrew-to-English translator from 1-800-TRANSLATE…and sure enough, it was the same article from the Times that I’d already found in English.
I hope that “L’Condel” is real — but I find myself wondering. And I still don’t know how to conjugate it.
Ask your Israeli friend. Non-irregular Hebrew verbs are conjugated according to the letters in the root. The nun is the only letter that would move the conjugation from the base form (AFAIK). But it is also a four letter root. Also, I think that the binyan is qal which also simplifies matters.
But take this advice with the proverbial large grain of salt. Ask someone who really knows.
I heard there was a ver “to Gooogle” something. Is there? What is the binyan? (verbe tense) appreciate any guidance on this. Thanks
sorry for the typos. I meant, Is there a new Hebrew verb ” to google” something? If you know, what tense is it, how is it declined (pres., past., future, etc) . Thanks for any info you may have.
I tried to use Google to translate “I Googled for information” into Hebrew, and it gave me “לקבלת מידע Googled אני”, so Google doesn’t think there’s a Hebrew verb for itself.
But then I asked an Israeli friend here at IBM, and he said it might be “מגגל”– that word gets 6 million or so hits on google.il. He also pointed at the Hebrew Wikipedia article on Google as a resource (but I can’t read Hebrew nearly well enough to know if it covers the verb form).
Hope that helps!