מְעַנְיֵן (me'anyen) — interesting
Etymology
February 3, 1893 was a remarkable day in Hebrew lexical history. A single issue of Ben-Yehuda's newspaper HaOr introduced not one but two new Hebrew words that have since become among the most common adjectives in the language: מְעַנְיֵן (interesting) and its antonym מְשַׁעְמֵם (boring). Ben-Yehuda also published, on the same day, a letter proposing the word שַׁגְרִיר (ambassador) — a word that was likewise accepted.
The occasion for coining מְעַנְיֵן was an article about Dr. Cornelius Herz, a German-French-American Jewish financier who was at the center of the Panama Canal scandal, one of the largest corruption cases France had known. The French Panama company, run by Ferdinand de Lesseps (builder of the Suez Canal) and Gustave Eiffel (builder of the Eiffel Tower), had secretly bribed over 100 French parliamentarians to conceal the company's financial difficulties. Herz and another German-Jewish figure, Jacques Reinach, served as the intermediaries for these bribes. According to Hannah Arendt, this scandal played a significant role in the rise of French antisemitism in the years immediately before the Dreyfus affair. But Herz was also a physician, a French army medical officer, and a central figure in electrifying Europe's telegraph and telephone networks. Ben-Yehuda found him "interesting" — but Hebrew lacked the word. He opened his article: "Among the men whose reputations have been stained by the 'Panama affair', Cornelius Herz is one of the most interesting (מְעַנְיֵנִים)," and added a footnote explaining the word: "from עִנְיָן, meaning those who arouse interest in a person's heart — interesting in the foreign language."
The antonym מְשַׁעְמֵם appeared that same day in the column "Revival of the Language," where Ben-Yehuda explained the problem: "'Ennui' in French, 'Langeweile' in German — 'boredom' — was difficult to translate accurately into Hebrew." He considered the Arabic roots for boredom (sha'ama, malal, dagger) and eventually settled on the Aramaic/Hebrew word שַׁעֲמוּם, used in the Mishna (Ketubot 5:5) by Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel to warn that "idleness leads to sha'amum." But Ben-Yehuda made a grammatical error: he took the shin of שַׁעֲמוּם to be a root letter, whereas it is in fact a prefix (the sh-f'el verb pattern), and the root is actually ע.מ.מ (to cover, darken). In Arabic and Aramaic the root means "to darken one's spirit" or simply "to suffer deep sorrow" — what Rabbi Gamliel actually meant was depression, not boredom.
The teacher Eliyahu Sapir pointed this out in a sharply witty letter published the following month, arguing that שַׁעֲמוּם meant something closer to madness or confusion, not mild boredom. He was philologically correct: the Talmud's one clear use of the word appears in "Targum Yonatan" as a translation for the third of four psychological afflictions God would inflict on Israel (Deuteronomy 28:28: "madness, blindness, and confusion of heart"). Sapir suggested the error would make people point at Hebrew speakers and say "they are meshuam'amim." Despite this criticism, and the philological inaccuracy, both מְעַנְיֵן and מְשַׁעְמֵם were accepted immediately and universally, and within a few years they had also generated the verbs לְעַנְיֵן (to interest) and לְשַׁעְמֵם (to bore).
Key Quotes
"בין האנשים אשר נתפסם שמם לרעה להקהל בדבר ׳מעשה פנמה׳, כורניליוס הרץ הוא אחד מהיתר מענינים" — Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, HaOr, 3 February 1893 (first use of מְעַנְיֵן)
"מן ענין, לאמר המעוררים ענין בלב האדם, אינטיריסנט בלעז" — Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, footnote explaining the coinage, HaOr, 3 February 1893
"השם שעמום רחוק מאד להמושג לאנגוילען, ואם נשתמש בזה יורו רבים עלינו באצבע ויאמרו משועממים אנחנו" — Eliyahu Sapir, letter to HaOr, March 1893
"הבטלה מביאה לידי שעמום" — Mishna Ketubot 5:5 (the Mishnaic source Ben-Yehuda drew on for שַׁעֲמוּם; actually means depression, not boredom)
Timeline
- Mishna Ketubot 5:5: שַׁעֲמוּם used to mean depression/dark mood (not boredom)
- Deuteronomy 28:28: תִּמָּהוֹן לֵבָב (confusion of heart) — the concept rendered as שַׁעֲמוּם by Targum Yonatan
- 3 February 1893: Ben-Yehuda coins מְעַנְיֵן and מְשַׁעְמֵם on the same day in HaOr; also publishes the שַׁגְרִיר proposal
- March 1893: Eliyahu Sapir publishes critique of מְשַׁעְמֵם's inaccuracy in HaOr
- Within a few years: Verbs לְעַנְיֵן and לְשַׁעְמֵם coined and adopted
Related Words
- מְשַׁעְמֵם — boring; the antonym coined the same day
- עִנְיָן — matter, subject, concern; the base noun from which מְעַנְיֵן derives
- שַׁגְרִיר — ambassador; another coinage whose proposal appeared in the same newspaper issue
- לְעַנְיֵן — to interest; the verb derived from מְעַנְיֵן
- לְשַׁעְמֵם — to bore; the verb derived from מְשַׁעְמֵם