# Yiddish: grubba



## zzjing

The following is from Joseph Heller's Good as Gold:

"How is Lieberman these days?”​“Still a grubba, still a zshlub.”​
What is a "grubba" exactly?


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## Abaye

I think grubba is borrowed from Polish gruby: fat, vulgar, unpleasant man. Similar to schlub (zshlub) which is apparently also from Polish.


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## Haskol

It's pretty much as Abaye said. Grubba here is the Yiddish *גראבער */grober/, probably borrowed from a non-rhotic Yiddish dialect (which today are mostly extinct or moribund).

I believe the literal meaning is "thick" or "fat" - e.g. the thumb is called the *גראבער פינגער *(the thick finger), but as Abaye said, it is also used to describe something that is vulgar, low-class and uncivilized. The word itself seems to have Germanic roots [it exists in Old High German as well as *grob *(coarse)] though similar words exist in Slavic languages as well. The meaning of "thick" seems to otherwise only exist in Polish *gruby*, so while probably not a Slavic loanword, the similar-sounding Polish word probably influenced the meaning of the Yiddish one.

Zshlub here should be either *zhlub *or *shlub *(a wrong but common pronunciation in English). It is the Yiddish word *זשלאב* (zhlob), a noun with a similar meaning to גראב - used to describe someone fat, lazy and/or vulgar. In this case, it seems to be a loanword from Russian, not Polish.

I should note though that another, practically opposite meaning exists for both words - they are used by some Yiddish speakers to describe *someone who is large and muscular, perhaps even a bit scary*. From what I understand, it depends on the dialect of the speaker, but this meaning doesn't seem to be relevant to the text you quoted.


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## zzjing

Thank you both for replying.


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