“Huylo is a smack”: the Israeli press about the Ukrainian Foreign Minister’s abuse of the Russian President

Israel's largest daily newspaper, Israel Hayom (Israel Today), explained to Hebrew readers on June 16 the essence of the incident near the Russian Embassy in Kiev, when the head of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry uttered a sharp curse against the Russian President on the night of May 15. Journalist Eli Leon told Hebrew readers that the term "huylo" means "smack."

It's funny that an Israeli journalist proposed an old Yiddish expression with approximately the same meaning to translate this Slavic curse into Hebrew. The word "shmok" in the 19th and 20th centuries was in the taboo zone of Yiddish, meaning the male genital organ (with a disparaging connotation). Some philologists believe that “shmok” in Yiddish originally did not mean the genital organ itself, but only the foreskin, which is removed from Jews during circumcision.

Together with Jews from the Russian Empire, “shmok” crossed the ocean and became part of modern American vernacular.

Let us note that the Israeli journalist in his article several times misspelled the name of Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytsia, writing it as “Shedshitsiya”. As a result, the Hebrew journalist began to take the minister’s surname from the Hebrew word “shed” - “devil.”

Commenting on the publication in the newspaper Israel Hayom, a lecturer at the Open University of Israel Mikhail Yurovsky noted that the spelling of the word “huylo” in Hebrew without vowels can be read by the Israelis as a verb in the passive “huylu”, which means “(they) were recruited as soldiers, equipped, made soldiers.” This form is derived from the Hebrew word "khayal" - soldier.

This “soldier’s” reading of the word huylo allows us to build the following semantic series: from the great Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, who used the expression "Take in moskali" in the meaning of "pick up the recruiting soldiers in the royal army,” and to the modern Hebrew expression “khuylu” with approximately the same soldier-mobilization meaning. Thus, it is possible to trace the connection between the root huylo and those semi-voluntary “militia” and saboteur militants from Russia operating in recent months from Crimea to Donbass.