A Lesson in Sexy and Sexist Hebrew Slang

The modern American man, more than ever, eats quiches, emotes and—like President Barack Obama—prefers conversation to confrontation. But the winds of gender role change have not yet blown into Israel, where the alpha-male ethos runs deep. Salty slang words like gever, kli and kusit delineate a public sphere where crude comments about women’s looks abound and macho beats out metrosexual.

Gever, literally the Hebrew word for man, is the sine qua non of manhood. “It means a man is tough, maybe a little macho and looks great physically,” says Shira Mayzenberg, an editor for the Ha’ir chain of newspapers. “A man who projects authority, knows what he wants and goes forward without hesitation,” adds Ruvik Rosenthal, Israel’s bestselling author on the subject of slang. Gever and gever gever are compliments used almost exclusively between men. “Ya gever, ma hamatzav?” (Hey bro, what’s up?) is a commonplace greeting between acquaintances, accompanied by a manly embrace or clap on the back.

Only occasionally do women address a man as gever—either as a compliment or a rebuke. “Be a gever, capitulate,” opposition leader Tzipi Livni, of Kadima taunted in a May speech criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s economic policies. Likud Knesset member Danny Danon later raised the insult in the Knesset committee on the status of women. “What if a Knesset member, minister or prime minister had spoken that way to a woman?” he complained.

Closely related to gever is the word achi (my brother) which, according to Rosenthal, may be the most frequently used Hebrew slang term. Young men address each other saying “Achi, what’s up, achi?” and “What do you say, achi, let’s go to a movie, achi.” Like gever, achi is almost always spoken by one man to another. One popular bumper sticker states: “Kravi zeh hachi, achi” (Combat units are the best, brother). But a cab driver can just as easily roll down his window and shout at a passer-by, “Achi, how do I get to Herzl Boulevard?”

Other slang words that describe men include patish (literally, a hammer) and kli (an instrument or weapon), which is the same as the slang term for the male reproductive organ. Both are highly complimentary and imply that someone is potent, powerful and aggressive. On the other hand, chnun connotes a weak, nerdy guy and comes from the Arabic word chnana, which means snot. “In Yiddish when you want to show contempt for someone you call him a shmarkatz, which means someone with a runny nose. Chnun is the same construction in Arabic,” explains Nissan Netzer, a language expert at Bar-Ilan University.

Slang terms that refer to women usually relate to looks. Foremost among these is kusit. Derived from a vulgar word in Arabic that refers to female genitalia, the expression got its start in the late 1970s as derogatory Israeli male locker-room lingo for a very attractive woman. The word is what linguists call a synecdoche, wherein an entire woman is referred to by a single part of her anatomy. The synecdoche has a long tradition in Hebrew: Nekava, which means female in both modern and ancient Hebrew, comes from the Biblical root nkv, which signifies a hole or opening.

“Many Israelis over the age of 50 regard the word kusit as profane,” says Rosenthal. Since the late 1980s, however, the word has been losing its power to shock. “For younger women,” he says, “it has become a badge of pride. ‘I am a kusit’ means ‘I am attractive and sexy.’” As Israeli actress Esti Zakheim explained to reporters in 2007, “I am not fat. I am an extra-large size kusit."

Slightly less offensive than kusit is frecha. “A frecha [Arabic for young female chicken] is a woman who is sexy but stupid and low-class,” explains Rosenthal. The word has been around since the early 1970s and originally referred to a Sephardic Jewish woman of Middle Eastern origin who exhibited traits of silliness and materialism. The 1979 song Shir Hafrecha (The Frecha Song or The Bimbo Song) by Ofra Haza is one of the biggest Israeli hits of all time even though it was originally banned on some radio stations. Some of the lyrics are: “I don’t have a head for long words/and you’re like a long word” and “I go wherever the fun is, with my nail polish, lipstick and other show-offy things…I feel like shouting out: ‘I’m a frecha!’”

A young frecha is a fakatza. The latter has evolved to refer to a certain kind of teenage girl from the upper-middle class who loves the color pink, uses American valley girl expressions like “ohmigod!” and “whatever” and speaks in an overly cute and mincing style. Linguists call it “fakatza language.”

It is hard to find Hebrew slang words that are female-positive. Mayzenberg recalls that when she was in the army, and a female soldier shot well or did a spectacular job, she would be called a malkah, a queen or hailed as a kelat olam (tool of the world). “We appropriated [the male] words and made them our own,” explains Mayzenberg. And how did these sisters-in-arms address each other? “We’d have military missions and even though you didn’t know the other person, it created a feeling of closeness. We called each other achoti, sister.” Out in the civilian world, women are catching up with men in the slang department as well. There is now a masculine version of the kusit—kuson—to signal that a man is hot. Take that, gever.—Simona Fuma Weinglass