Hebrew Language Academy Flummoxed By ‘In The Black’

“We can’t wrap our heads around that idea,” admitted a committee member.

Jerusalem, January 20 – Israel’s authority on the proper Hebrew equivalent to vernacular terms adopted into the language has declined to translate foreign terms referring to a positive balance in one’s bank account, an official with the organization told reporters today, saying they saw such a term as completely irrelevant in modern Hebrew.

Max Dowtt, an adviser to the Hebrew Language Academy’s committee on new terminology, said at a press conference that the Academy sees fit to adopt terms only for relevant concepts, and that the notion of not being in debt, let alone of having enough liquidity to meet one’s expenses, has no place in Israeli society. Terms such as “debt free,” “in the black,” and “paid off my mortgage” have no utility or currency in Israel, and the Academy therefore removed them from a list of terms for which it was soliciting proposed Hebrew translations.

The non-applicability of terms for not owing money was not the only factor in the Academy’s refusal to seek translations for them, says Dowtt: among the various advisory committees, few members had even heard of the concept, and those who did, having been raised abroad, were unable to explain the terms in a way that could be understood. “We have a good number of people on these committees, especially in fields such as technology and finance, who spent years in other countries and are comfortable in their idiom,” he explained. “But even they found it impossible to convey to the other committee members what it meant to be without debt. The rest of us, well, we can’t wrap our heads around that idea.”

The committees in question comprise experts in various specialized fields who collectively develop and propose equivalent Hebrew terms for newly popular or newly coined words and phrases seeing use in those fields. For example, a team of programmers and software engineers recommended that the “Easter egg,” a hidden feature of an application that can be accessed or activated with a specific series of actions, be rendered “Afikoman” in Hebrew, referring to a Passover Seder ritual in which a piece of matza is hidden for later consumption. The Academy accepted that term, partially owing to the seasonal similarity of the original term and its proposed translation. However, no such cognitive common ground exists for terms evoking a state in which  person does not owe money, a concept completely alien to Israeli society.

Rosh Qattan, a spokesman for the Academy, recalled several other cases in which the institution declined to submit certain English terms to the advisory committees, for lack of utility and relevance. In 1959 the Academy asked for a detailed explanation for the terms “waiting in line” and “queue up,” not having encountered those ideas. It ultimately rejected the terms as worthy of translation, as no Israeli would understand anything other than forming a chaotic crowd and pushing to the front as fast as possible.

Similarly, the Academy has on various occasions ruled irrelevant or incomprehensible such terms as “discreet,” “on time,” “too sugary,” and “Pooper-Scooper.”