הִבְרִיז (hibriz) — to stand up / bail on / betray
Etymology
The verb הִבְרִיז was born from the everyday noun בֶּרֶז (faucet, tap). The noun itself was documented by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in his 1901 pocket Hebrew–Yiddish–Russian dictionary, where he offered two variant forms: בֶּרֶז and בִּרְזָה. The public settled on בֶּרֶז, which appears in literary Hebrew from the start of the 20th century — in Uri Nisan Gnessin's novella Betrem (1909), Yosef Haim Brenner's Shkhol ve-Kishalon (1920), and in the official Hebrew Language Committee dictionaries from 1928. Ben-Yehuda's source for the word was the Aramaic term בְּרָזָא, used by the Talmudic sages to describe the spigot-hole of a wine barrel (Avodah Zarah 59b).
The road from "faucet" to "betrayal" runs through Israeli prison and military slang of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The earliest documented use is the compound phrase דָּפַק בֶּרֶז ("hit/broke a faucet"), attested in 1980 in a Maariv column by journalist Amos Levav describing IDF soldiers' speech, and in 1981 in a glossary of Tel Mond prison slang, where it is glossed as "breach of trust." How a faucet came to mean betrayal is uncertain; two hypotheses are offered: (1) in prison culture, a "tap" referred to a smuggling channel, and informing on it was the ultimate breach of trust; (2) literally breaking a fellow inmate's faucet caused real hardship. A "cleaner" variant שָׂם בֶּרֶז ("put a faucet") appears in Amnon Dankner's 1986 novel.
From the noun phrase, Hebrew speakers abstracted the root בר״ז and created the hif'il verb הִבְרִיז through a process linguists call denominalization. Scholar Sarah Avinon analyzed this in her 1996 book Hege ve-Tzurot. The fully formed verb appears in print from 1990, in Orly Castel-Bloom's novel Heykhan Ani Nimtzet, and was ubiquitous in Israeli prose and journalism by 1994.
A rival etymology proposed by lexicographer Dr. Ruvik Rosenthal derived הִבְרִיז from North African Arabic, where the root בר״ז (borrowed from French briser, "to break/cancel an appointment") carries a similar meaning. However, the total absence of any documentary evidence for the word in Hebrew before the late 1980s argues strongly against this Moroccan import hypothesis and in favor of native denominalization.
Key Quotes
"דפקתי לבניטה ברז לא נורמאלי" — עמוס לבב, מעריב, 1980
"עד לפני זמן מה אמרו למי ששיבש את התכניות: 'איזה ברז עשית לנו!' היום כבר אומרים — 'איך הברזת לנו!'" — שרה אבינון, הגה וצורות, 1996
Timeline
- 1901: Ben-Yehuda documents בֶּרֶז from Aramaic בְּרָזָא in his pocket dictionary
- 1909: בֶּרֶז appears in Uri Nisan Gnessin's novella Betrem
- 1928: בֶּרֶז officially recognized by the Hebrew Language Committee
- 1980: Journalist Amos Levav documents דָּפַק בֶּרֶז in IDF slang (Maariv)
- 1981: Tel Mond prison glossary defines דָּפַק בֶּרֶז as "breach of trust"
- 1986: שָׂם בֶּרֶז appears in Amnon Dankner's novel; Maariv headline "פרס שם ברז לאסד"
- 1990: הִבְרִיז first in Israeli literature (Orly Castel-Bloom)
- 1992: Etgar Keret uses הִבְרִיז in Tzinnorot
- 1994: Word fully mainstream — Ram Oren, Benny Barbash, Assi Dayan
- 1996: Sarah Avinon formally analyzes the denominalization process
Related Words
- בֶּרֶז — faucet/tap; the source noun
- שָׂם בֶּרֶז — earlier idiomatic phrase meaning to stand someone up
- דָּפַק בֶּרֶז — original compound idiom, meaning breach of trust