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From: R. Kovacs
Subject: Vocabulary file
Date: 11 Av 5782
Nu, Rav Halevi makes an important point.
My zeyde had a saying (I do not know if it was his or if he heard it somewhere): "When you borrow a word, you borrow its history."
In Munkács, there was a dispute once about whether to use the German word or the Hungarian word for a certain document. This was a legal document, something about property, I think. My grandfather was not entirely clear on the details. The rav (this was not the Munkácser Rebbe, this was a different rav, I cannot remember his name) said it did not matter what word they used, as long as everyone understood what it meant. But his wife, the rebbetzin, she said the German word carried implications from the Austrian bureaucracy that the Hungarian word did not. She had worked in a government office before she married, so she knew these things.
They argued about this for longer than the document took to write.
I do not know which word they chose in the end. My grandfather said the document was lost anyway, along with everything else.
—Shlomo Dov Kovacs
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