The Stars and the Cookie Jar

So I was reading in Ruth Wisse and she makes the claim that gays and lesbians want to revive Yiddish as a cover for their own gay, lesbian agenda. In enlightened 2002 she said this, mind.

*SNORK*.

Yeah, Mayles is just chockablock with those gays 'n' lesbians. [Mayles is kind of like Life Magazine Meets Good Housekeeping Meets Tikkun, 'cept printed in loshn. It's an okay magazine. But it's not, yanno. Friendly.]

I'm a middle-ground Yiddishist, and I happen to be gay. However, I'm balls at keeping an agenda. I can barely make it to the train on time.

I acquired half my knowledge of the language organically, you know, from daily speech. Boro Park Yiddish is in constant flux; it's not a dead language, because it's growing. It borrows steadily more words, for the more modern concepts, from English. Maybe this is a bad thing; maybe it's diluting the stock of the language. However, I've been looking at Yiddish grammars for beginning students, lately, and it's just -- it's stilted, it's cold, it's horrible. The Yiddish that secular people learn is locked in 1930 sometime. About the only good thing I can say for it is, well, they cleave to YIVO standard spellings. But who the hell standardises their spelling? I mean, my Yiddish for usage is solidly Litvak, but written on paper? I'm just as likely to say vaynt as veynt, maydl as meydl.

All that is backstory for this one thing percolating in my brain: Who decides a language's agenda? Who decides when a language dies, or when it stops growing? The people who print the grammars and lexicons? Or the people who use it every day? Is Yiddish dead already, because we have der Internete, di MetroCard, di pizza ?

It's just. People who use Yiddish learn one thing, and people who come to it from the outside, as enthusiasts, scholars, or revivalists, learn some other version, that's not really vital at all. So what's the point?