More than one commentator criticizing Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the U.S. credit rating has accused the agency of chutzpah; a Supreme Court justice wrote a recent dissent describing the petitioners’ argument in a public finance case as an instance of the same quality, and a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination finds so much chutzpah in the incumbent’s behavior that she is impelled to use the word before she’s even learned to pronounce it. The past few months have seen a jump in chutzpah sightings—in public uses of the Yiddish word for nerve or audacity, if not in chutzpah itself, which has become so predictable a feature of public life that it now provokes weary resignation as often as outrage or fury.
Between S&P, Elena Kagan, and Michele Bachmann, “chutzpah” is now ranking higher on Google Trends than at any time since the great spike of 2007, caused by a perfect storm of a Bush aide calling out the Clintons over the Scooter Libby affair and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad requesting permission to visit ground zero. Indeed, if Google’s search insights are any indication, “chutzpah” consistently out-performs the “cojones” that are sometimes invoked in its place—and is a runaway winner in Washington. (The main exception was in August 2010, when Sarah Palin, yet another potential president, accused President Barack Obama of having a nether profile more suited to a Ken doll than to a leader, and cojones were “on everybody’s lips,” as CNN’s Jeanne Moos put it.) While more Americans are familiar with Spanish than with Yiddish—a simple Google search yields 12.5 million entries for “cojones,” a mere 2.7 million for “chutzpah”—and more people are thus likely to require an explanation or definition for a use of “chutzpah,” there is a simple reason why neither term should replace the other: Real chutzpah is not the same thing as cojones. Read more »
