Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

Noted blogeuse Annie, as in “Annie, get your,” as in Jewbiquitous, wanted to know why I spelled it “Balestinian” instead of “Palestinian” or “Qassammy Davis, Jr.” According to… oh, probably Michael, the dialect of Arabic spoken in Syria (including its left arm, Lebanon) has a phonetic quirk whereby they don’t use the voiceless bilabial stop, /p/. When pronouncing loanwords, for example “Palestine,” they tend to use the voiced cognate, /b/. This leads to some hilarious minimal-pair hijinks, such as:

“The plight of the Palestinian people” becomes the amusingly accurate “the blight of the Balestinian beoble.”

“All-h be praised” becomes the delicious “All-h be braised.”

And so, since I’m kind of an ass, I refer to Those People as the Balestinians.