Hello one and all!

I hope that the festive period was pleasant for you all.

I am writing this post amidst great emotion and not because of what happened with Gilad Shallit which needs a post in itself (there is no need to tell you how excited and happy everyone here is). I am excited because of something that I heard on the radio today.

“The Israeli government plans to begin a green campaign for the Israeli industry.” Why am I so excited? For many reasons. First of all I am happy to hear that the state of Israel understands the importance of being “green” in industry. This is indeed an important point. But also, this is a problem that we Hebrew teachers have, I got excited when I heard in the news this morning a new verb!

It is true that I have already talked about the new verbs that we use day to day due to the evolving language, and it is true that I have already posed about it but it still is exciting. It is even more exciting that in the news this morning they chose to speak entirely in Hebrew and say: לירק (meaning to become more environmentally friendly/ go green) instead of choosing to use a foreign word.

And if we are already dealing with the news this morning (I’m not saying which station), I am happy to say that on the same station and the same radio personality, they are always careful to say כרוכית instead of @which in slang is called a strudel because it looks like the strudel pastry.

Here, we begin the discussion that accompanies us as Israelis and I would be happy to hear what you think: Does the love of the Hebrew language have to be absolute without any external influences? Is it the case that if the academy has found, after much deliberation and anguish, a Hebrew word to replace a foreign word that we have got accustomed  to using in the local dialect, must we warmly embrace this new word and stop to use the word we have used up until this point?

Osnat