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Revision as of 01:37, 13 November 2006
Yenta (יענתּאַ) from the Yiddish Yente, a back-formation from the woman's name Yente, alteration of Yentl, from Old Italian Gentile, from gentile, amiable, highborn, from Latin gentīlis, of the same clan. Yenta is a term sometimes used to describe a Jewish Female. Despite its higher origins, today yenta is a descriptive term for a funny talkative Jewish female to a gossipy woman; a blabbermouth, who can't keep a secret, who spreads rumors and scandal and gladly gives advice whether or not one even wants it, to a popular term for a matchmaker.
Yenta doesn't have anything necessarily to do with match-making; in fact, the Yiddish word for matchmaker is shadchan, not yenta, yet it does have that usage in both social and cybersocial contexts; it is used often in that manner. Yenta is the name of the matchmaker in the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof. This is something of an erroneous association, since matchmakers in traditional Eastern European Jewish shtetls were men, and the match was settled between the fathers. The original stories of Sholom Aleichem, from which Fiddler on the Roof is based, have all the matchmakers as men.
Yenta is becoming a popular comic term for a funny American Jewish woman. One notable example, and there are many, is Annie Korzen and YENTA UNPLUGGED (Excuse Me, I’m Talking!), an urban, contemporary look at womanhood, from the Bronx to Beverly Hills. Korzen (SEINFELD’s Doris Klompus) tells a coming-of-age story of what it’s like to grow up female and Jewish in America. Korzen work slices through tired stereotypes. First performance date was March, 1996.
The name Yenta has also been applied, perhaps somewhat erroneously, to matchmaking websites and matchmaking software, and it is the name of the Linux CardBus controller driver, which brings together Cardbus cards with the rest of the computer. Yenta, apart from the popular dating context, is also a highly developed peer-to-peer coalition-formation computing system that autonomously determines users' interests and then automatically forms discussion groups, in which users who share one or more interests may send secure real-time messages to each other, either one-to-one or in groups. The system was originally developed as part of Leonard Foner's doctoral dissertation at the MIT Media Lab's Software Agents group and his patented method and system for constructing a knowledge profile of users comprising both a public and private data base of a computer users profile.
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Ester Goldberg, is the self-proclaimed Yenta of all media. www.estergoldberg.com
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