A BBC World Service Tweet advertising a radio programme about Yiddish caused quite a stir on January 3rd.
Several hours later that Tweet was deleted.
Such crass euphemism is fortunately absent from the programme itself – “Yiddish: A story of survival” – and its synopsis states:
“At its height, Yiddish, the language of the European Jews, was spoken by more than ten million people, from Russia in the east to the Netherlands in the West. But by the mid -20th century, these numbers were severely depleted following the Holocaust, and then the creation of the modern-day state of Israel where the speaking of Yiddish was discouraged.”
From 20:35 listeners to the programme get a more comprehensive explanation of “the factors that led to the demise of Yiddish around the mid-twentieth century” from one of the programme’s contributors.
That of course raises the question of whether whoever was operating the BBC World Service Twitter account at the time actually bothered to listen to the programme or at least read its synopsis before composing that miserable Tweet.
