A fakakta is a thing, object, or person that is completely messed up. It is not working as it should be, or maybe it should not have been working from the start. This Yiddish term is the perfect slang for anything that is negative. In Yiddish, shonde means a disgrace, a shame, a terrible embarrassment, a scandal.
From the age of 5 to 7 years of age, I thought I knew two SPECIAL swear words, SPECIAL, because they originated from a foreign language, (Yiddish) and SPECIAL, well, because only my Grandma and her sisters would say them, and only in a hushed voice and making a stink face when the words were uttered! The swear words, I could swear were bad words, were FAKATA, and SHONDA. My little sister and I would giggle when we happened to pass by my Grandma, and she would furiously mover her hands, full of animation, contort her face, so tightly that once finished speaking she would have to reapply her red rouge, and with just the amount pf spittle to fall like a light misty sprinkle of rain, somewhere in her sentence, my Grandma would refer to someone or something as FAKATA, and end her sentence making a dour and misshapen face, as her upper lip and lower lip became ONE lip, and hiss, “and what a SHONDA!”
My little sister and I would run to my mother and tell on our Grandma, asking why she could swear, and we could not (even though we actually had no idea what a swear word was, and why one would use it! We’d say the word we heard, and my mother would look at us using her mystery voice (the kind of voice in which when we asked what we were getting as a gift for our birthdays, she would answer, ‘BIRTHDAY, WHOSE BIRTHDAY’.
So the news this week is once again a resurgence of COVID, the lack of interest by the Red State Legislatures to even care about their Red State Morons, the stupidity of those unvaccinated to believe in science, and decide death and dying is cool…and once again, another heatwave as in extreme, as in Climate Change Dangerous is about to explode in the west…And what are we doing about both…HMMM, rubbing our hands, becoming outraged, and more or less nothing else…What a SHONDE as to how much FAKATA is going on!
