Yes, I am chopped liver

People suck. They really suck. It's a never ending series of betrayals. And I am chopped liver. But enough already.

More interesting and less heated, is the story of how those fabulously descriptive phrases came into our national language.

And the NY Times, naturally has the story, in a column written some time ago by William safire, entitled, "On Language; Enough Already! What Am I, Chopped Liver?"

October 25, 1998
On Language; Enough Already! What Am I, Chopped Liver?
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

'What red-blooded American hasn't surveyed the muck and mire of our national politics,'' writes Mark Jurkowitz of The Boston Globe, ''and said, 'Enough, already'?''

''Time magazine reports that Clinton's woes have left U.S. foreign policy adrift,'' writes The Guardian of London, ''though Garrison Keillor says, 'Enough already!' ''

Howard Fineman of Newsweek asks, ''Is there any way out of this mess?'' leading to an inch-high, 102-point, block-letter headline: ''enough already.''

The stylistic issue raised is: Should there be a comma between the first and second words of this increasingly important phrase? The publication that pioneered in its popularization is The Toronto Globe and Mail; of the 19,000 entries in the Dow Jones database, the first 22 uses (from 1977 to 1983) were in that newspaper. According to Warren Clements, style editor, ''We abandoned the comma in 1979 because enough already was considered one of those expressions that is almost one word. It rips rollingly off the tongue; the comma would slow it down.'' Adds Michael Kesterton of that newspaper, ''I know it's a Yiddishism, but it just fits the Canadian soul -- you know, 'I've had it and I'm not gonna take it anymore.' ''

The origin is the Yiddish genug shoyn, literally ''enough already.'' It is part of an array of phrases using shoyn for emphasis, from the similar gut shoyn, ''All right already!'' in the sense of ''Stop bugging me,'' to shvayg shtil shoyn, ''Shut up already!'' one calibration more irritated than genug shoyn.

''This use of already began to appear early in the century,'' says Sol Steinmetz, the lexicographer who has taken the place of the late Leo Rosten as my primary Yiddish adviser, ''among immigrant Yiddish speakers living in New York who were just starting to talk English. By the 1930's it had become common usage among their children who no longer spoke Yiddish -- a development that enabled it to entrench itself in the American language.''

Another scholar, Lillian Feinsilver, in her ''Taste of Yiddish'' (1970), notes that ''English would normally use the mild now, as in 'Come, now,' or the stronger 'Come on, now.' ''

Now is an adverb of time that can be used as an admonition before a statement (''Now, I want you to listen to this. . . ''). Similarly, already and yet are adverbs of time that can be used to intensify a statement when used at the end. (''Were you bitten by a mad dog?'' ''And the dog is mad, yet.'') Thus, already -- in Standard English, ''beforehand; by this time'' -- can be used in this idiomatic sense to mean ''without further ado'' or ''and you'd better believe it.''

We have seen how this Yiddishism has been thoroughly assimilated and is now an Americanism. Because other American English expressions have been adopted in many other languages -- O.K. and no problem are examples -- does this mean that this particular emphasis of exasperation is taking root elsewhere?

Some evidence exists that it does. Here is a letter to The Washington Post from Robert Hill, an American working in a large Saudi hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: ''The overwhelming -- by 9 to 1 -- response to the Clinton affair varies among 'What is the very big deal?' to 'What about the problems in the rest of the world?' to 'Enough already!' ''

When a Yiddishism takes root in Riyadh, that's saying something. Have we exhausted this subject? The reader may now vent exasperation at a surfeit of data by expostulating the very phrase being so minutely examined.

WHAT AM I?

At a chic Washington cocktail party, Elizabeth Drew, author of ''Whatever It Takes: The Real Struggle for Political Power in America,'' accepted an hors d'oeuvre of chopped liver smeared on a cracker and asked: ''Chopped liver is delicious. Why do people derogate it so? As in the expression, 'What am I, chopped liver?' ''

The earliest use of this phrase in its derogatory sense -- that is, ''something trivial; something to be scoffed at'' -- in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang is by Jimmy Durante on his 1954 CBS-TV show: ''Now that ain't chopped liver.''

In a 1980 monologue about the Reagan-Carter Presidential debate, Johnny Carson noted Ronald Reagan's statement that if all the unemployed were lined up, they would stretch from New York to Los Angeles. ''He came up with another one today,'' said Carson. ''If everyone on welfare were chopped liver, you could spread them on a line of Ritz crackers from here to Bulgaria.'' A decade later, the actor-producer Michael Douglas applied the phrase to himself, complaining about his secondary role in a movie: ''That hurt me in the industry as an actor, and it ticked me off. I thought, What was I -- chopped liver or something?''

This show-biz usage contributed to the treatment of the ethnic culinary delicacy (in Yiddish, gehakte leber) as an object of disdain. It may have also been influenced by its sense in underworld lingo as ''a beaten and scarred person,'' or by the urbanization of the once-rural expression ''That ain't hay.'' Steinmetz speculates: ''Chopped liver is merely an appetizer or side dish, not as important as chicken soup or gefilte fish. Hence it was often used among Jewish comedians in the Borscht Belt as a humorous metaphor for something or someone insignificant.''

Nobody who tastes properly made chopped liver can use it as a derogation. I turned to my Times colleague Marian Burros, author of ''The New Elegant But Easy Cookbook,'' for the recipe: ''Saute one finely chopped medium onion in two tablespoons hot chicken fat until lightly golden and very soft. Add 1 pound chicken liver and saute until cooked through; process in food processor with one small raw onion and one hard-cooked egg. Season with salt and pepper and mix with enough chicken fat to make it moist and spreadable.''

Then you can say, ''I feel just as terrific as chopped liver!''

* Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company