A tremendous post

The problem with all my Heblish posts is that I risk being typecast.

After all, I certainly don’t want to be dismissed as, “Mrs. S? Oh, you mean that Heblish blogger?”

And so, I’ve decided to turn my attention to another made-up language: Yeshivish.

While Heblish is a blend of Hebrew and English, Yeshivish is compromised of four languages: Yiddish, Aramaic, Hebrew, and English.

But if Yeshivish doesn’t interest you, let me assure you that my foray into this topic will be brief and limited to a single question.

Specifically, I’ve been wondering:

Do non-Yeshivish speakers use the word “tremendous”?

I mean, one hears the phrases, “a tremendous learner,” “a tremendous ba’al tzedakah,” and even [the rather oxymoronic] “a tremendous anav,” all the time.

But no one ever says, “a tremendous software developer,” “a tremendous doctor” or even “a tremendous blogger.”

Feel free to leave a comment with more anecdotal evidence, but in the meantime, I headed to Google for some cold hard facts.

As you can see from the following chart*, an incredible 14% of the time that someone used the word “tremendous” somewhere on the Web, they did so in a Jewish context.

Moreover, when I searched for the emphatic “tremendous tremendous”, the percentage jumped to a whopping 17%.

If 17% doesn’t sound like much, please note that Jewish-themed pages presumably account for considerably less than 17% of the Web.

Search term	Number of hits	Percentage
tremendous	34,400,000	--
tremendous Jews OR Jewish OR Jew OR Israel OR rabbi OR Torah OR Yisroel OR Yisrael OR Yiddishkeit	4,760,000	14% of “tremendous” alone
"tremendous tremendous"	14,500	--
"tremendous tremendous" Jews OR Jewish OR Jew OR Israel OR rabbi OR Torah OR Yisroel OR Yisrael OR Yiddishkeit	2,390	17% of ”tremendous tremendous” alone

Now that’s tremendous…

________

* Yes, I am inordinately proud of myself for figuring out how to make HTML tables. Why do you ask? :-)