Significance
The expression is often abbreviated to simply oy, or elongated to oy vey ist mir ("Oh, woe am I"). The fuller lament may also be spelled as Oy vey iz mir. The main purpose or effect of elongating it is often dramatic, something like a "cosmic ouch". Oy is not merely an ordinary word, but rather expresses an entire world view, according to anthropologist Penny Wolin.
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Famous quotes containing the word significance:
“Politics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government. Like other values it has its counterfeits. So much emphasis has been placed upon the false that the significance of the true has been obscured and politics has come to convey the meaning of crafty and cunning selfishness, instead of candid and sincere service.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“The hysterical find too much significance in things. The depressed find too little.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)