Happy Birthday Leo Rosten

It's the birthday of writer and humorist Leo Rosten, (books by this author) born in Lodz, in what is now Poland, in 1908. He grew up in Chicago, went to the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics, but still wasn't sure what to do with his life. He worked for a while teaching English to adults in night school, and wrote critical essays and sold them to magazines like Harper's. But then his wife, Priscilla Ann Mead (Margaret Mead's sister), contracted pneumonia and appendicitis, and they needed more money to pay her medical bills. So he decided to try writing humorous pieces, which were published in The New Yorker, and soon everyone thought of him as a humorist.

He published a book of his humorous sketches, which were based on his experience teaching new immigrants at the night school. The book, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (1937), was a huge success, praised by everyone from Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse to the Nurses Association of America, who wrote Rosten to tell him that he should put a warning label on it so that their patients who read it didn't burst their stitches from laughing so hard.

He published several more humorous books, including The Joys of Yiddish (1968), also a best-seller — a book that he described as "a relaxed lexicon of Yiddish, Hebrew, and Yinglish words often encountered in English, plus dozens that ought to be." He describes the 20 situations where one should say feh; 19 meanings of Nu? (including "What's the hurry?" and "How are things with you?"); and has entries on oy, chutzpah, mish-mosh, and many more words.
The Writer's Almanac