The Language and Grammar of the Olim Urban Dictionary

The other day, my son came home from Miluim and, while describing a car he wants to buy, he talked about its comfortability. Or maybe he was referring to his Negev? Been a busy week.

Anyway, my wife and I looked at him, then each other, and said, “What?” as he explained what he meant.

Thus ensued a discussion about whether “comfortability” is actually a word.

It is not. Sorta.

You see, the Merriam-Webster dictionary does not have it, nor does the hallowed Oxford dictionary.

And yet, if you say it to almost anyone in our social circle, or any Anglo community, they will nod along as if you just used the most natural phrasing in the world. Because in our little corner of Anglo-Israeli life, it has become real.

Not quite slang, not real, just part of the Olim Urban Dictionary.

This is what happens to your language when you make Aliyah (immigrate to Israel).

And I do not mean just in the early years when you are scrambling to survive in Hebrew, and your English starts filling in the gaps with whatever fits.

I mean ten years later, twelve for us, when you think you have stabilized, when you believe you have two functioning languages. I don’t, but the rest of the family does. Then your family opens their mouths, and you realize you have all built a third language that belongs entirely to your household and possibly no one else. Until you are at friends and they use the same terms and bizarre grammar.

If you have never lived as an immigrant, here is what this actually feels like.

You wake up one day and notice that the word you just used to explain something perfectly sensible to your spouse does not technically exist in any dictionary either of you grew up with. Your brain playing tricks on you?

Not slang, not a regional expression, not a borrowing from Hebrew. Just a word your brain assembled from legitimate English parts, applied logical grammar rules to, maybe, and spoke with complete confidence.

“Comfortability” sounds like a word. It follows the pattern. It communicates the idea. But it is not a real word, even if it has found its way into daily life.

My kids often accuse me of making up words they don’t know because their English education did not continue unless they read more books or newspapers/websites in English. Higher level words, for instance: encroachment, numismatist, horologist, or realm.

To be quite fair, my kids have also not picked up what these terms would be in higher level Hebrew either, not yet, but as they get through college and the business world, one hopes they will learn them.

This is not just about one made-up word. It is about what living between languages does to a family over time. It does not leave you bilingual so much as it leaves you speaking something in between, a running negotiation between the language you grew up in and the one that now runs your daily life.

Hebrew grammar starts sneaking into your English sentence structure. English words start getting conjugated as if they were Hebrew verbs. We have caught ourselves saying things like “nu, so what’s the situation?” where nu is that one Hebrew syllable that means approximately “well,” “so,” “come on,” “are you serious,” and “I am waiting” depending entirely on how long you stretch it out.

My kids are the real architects of this phenomenon. They came here young enough that Hebrew was embedded in them, but they still think in a kind of English that has been running in the background all along.

What comes out is a hybrid that occasionally produces sentences I have to stop and replay in my head. One of them once told me something was “very much not happening for me,” which is a direct translation from a Hebrew phrase, meaning absolutely nothing in standard English but communicating perfectly to everyone at the table.

And that, honestly, is the part that gets me. It communicates. That is the strange and slightly wonderful thing about the language your immigrant family builds without meaning to. It works. “Comfortability” communicates something specific that “comfort” does not quite cover: a sustained state rather than a feeling, something you can have more or less of.

Whether Merriam-Webster approves is, at some level, a separate question from whether the word is doing its job.

Israelis know good enough is good enough without caring if it is good enough, as long as it serves a purpose.

I’ll wait as you reread that tongue twister.

If a word does the job, it does the job. The dictionary is not always in the room.

Not every invented word earns its keep. Some of them are just mistakes we have collectively agreed to ignore. But it is amusing when one of us does this, especially when someone else calls you out on it.

I still would not write “comfortability” in any formal document. But at our dinner table in Rehovot, the word has tenure now.

Language, it turns out, is less like a law and more like a neighborhood. It changes by who moves in.

Olim, and other friends who have moved around the world, hang in there, enjoy your own creativity in adding to your own Urban dictionaries.