חנטריש (khantarish) — nonsense; fake; rubbish; low quality
Etymology
חנטריש entered Israeli Hebrew as slang of uncertain origin. The first documented written appearance is from 1966, in a column by Menachem Talmi in Ma'ariv presenting the street argot of "the underworld and the neighborhoods." The word was already clearly in use before this. It rose to broad popularity after featuring in the comedy trio HaGashash HaHiver's 1967 sketch "The Devil": "darkness, light, reality — it's all חנטריש." The word became a generational marker for Israeli youth in the late 1960s, used to express contempt for institutions and values their parents respected.
The meaning has always been somewhat unstable. Dan Ben-Amotz and Nativa Ben-Yehuda's 1972 slang dictionary Milon Olami Le-Ivrit Meduberet noted: "for some, חנטריש is anything bad, while others will insist it means something fake, insubstantial — something that appears good but on closer inspection turns out to be bad." Courts had to grapple with the word: in 1976, Meir Levia of Jaffa was prosecuted for insulting police officers by calling them "חנטרישים," but judge Haim Eilat acquitted him, ruling the word was not a term of abuse since its meaning shifts with context: "nonsense, not right, not okay."
The etymology has been contested since at least 1977. Four main proposals have been advanced: (1) Arabic — journalist Tamar Avidar proposed the word derived from ḥantur (Arabic for an old service taxi) + rish (feathers), suggesting an image of a battered cab "flying with feathers"; (2) Greek — linguist Moshe Piamenta proposed derivation from Modern Greek χοντρός (khontros, "excessive, coarse"), first heard in Tel Aviv in 1949 spread by Salonican dock-workers; (3) Turkish — the Rav-Milim dictionary (1997) suggested the Turkish word kandırış (deception, fraud); (4) Persian — linguist Tamar Ilan Gindun proposed Persian khanda-rish ("laughingstock," literally "old man's laugh"), which may have entered through Arabic.
The most probable reconstruction traces all four parallel forms — Arabic khantarish ("bad, sucker"), Turkish kandırış, Persian rish-khandi — to a common ancestor: Ancient Greek χονδρός, meaning "coarse" (as opposed to "fine") and by extension "uncouth" or "of inferior quality." The word spread across the Middle East in the Hellenistic period and took different phonological and semantic forms in different languages. The Hebrew form most likely entered through Lebanese Arabic, brought by immigrants to Israel around the time of the state's founding.
Key Quotes
"חושך, אור, מציאות, זה חנטריש הכל" — הגשש החיוור, מערכון ״השד״, 1967
"חנטריש למשל, לגבי אחדים, הוא כל דבר גרוע ואילו אחרים יתעקשו שפרושו משהו מזויף, בלתי יסודי, משהו אשר למראית עין נראה כטוב אך מתגלה בבדיקה יסודית יותר - כגרוע" — דן בן-אמוץ ונתיבה בן-יהודה, מלון עולמי לעברית מדוברת, 1972
"נדרשתי למקורה של המלה חנטריש... המלה שכיחה בשפת הדיבור היוונית, הדימותיקי... ביוונית היא נהגית ח׳ונטרושׂ בהטעמה מלרע והוראתה מוגזם (בזלזול). לראשונה שמעתיה בתל-אביב ב-1949" — משה פיאמנטה, ידיעות אחרונות, 1979
Timeline
- Ancient Greek period: χονδρός in use meaning "coarse, crude, of inferior quality"
- Hellenistic period onward: word spreads across Middle East, diverging into Arabic, Turkish, Persian forms
- 19th century: Persian forms rish-khandi, khandish, etc. documented — likely folk etymologizations
- By 1949: Word heard in Tel Aviv slang (Piamenta's testimony)
- 1966: First documented written use, in Menachem Talmi's Ma'ariv column
- 1967: HaGashash HaHiver's sketch "The Devil" popularizes the word nationally
- 1969: Used by court defendants to describe the legal system and the bagrut exams
- 1971: Graffiti at Hebrew University reads "psychology = חנטריש"
- 1972: Defined in Ben-Amotz/Ben-Yehuda slang dictionary
- 1976: Court case over whether the word constitutes an insult; defendant acquitted
- 1977: Avidar proposes Arabic ḥantur + rish etymology
- 1979: Piamenta proposes Greek khontros etymology
- 1997: Rav-Milim dictionary proposes Turkish kandırış
- 2003: Even-Shoshan dictionary provides Arabic compound etymology
- 2005: Ruvik Rosenthal's slang dictionary endorses the compound etymology
- ~2015: Rosenthal revises his view; Tamar Gindun's Persian khanda-rish theory gains traction
Related Words
- נאחס — another slang term for bad luck / bad quality, often collocated with חנטריש
- חנטרש — the derived verb: "to talk nonsense, to make something up"