--- Marianne Macdonald
<
marianne.macdonald@lineone.net> wrote:
> 1. Will somebody who either uses the word or
owns
> an
> American-English dictionary please tell me what
a
> "gonif" is/means?
> (ref. first page, Chap. 3 of Campbell's IN
LA-LA
> LAND WE TRUST - just
> started it, looks promising).
>
Hi Marianne, I'll take a stab at it. I believe gonif is a
variation of the yiddish ganef, which is a thief or a
scoundrel. It definitely has a negative conotation, I've seen
it refer to a grifter and another time to more of a hired
thug so I think there is some leeway with the usage. I read
Campbell's first a while back and enjoyed it. Is this the one
that opens with a car accident involving a hearse? That
'scene' was pretty memorable. Best, Will
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo!
Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 02 Apr 2004 EST