It's all Greek to me! I guess she just made a mistake......It sounds like a German word.
Re: Margaret Cho and
zaftig:Conceivably she didn't want to say
Yiddish for fear it would sound anti-Semitic. I don't know what came first,
Yiddish as the name for the language, or
Yid as a slur for a Jewish person.
But in any case this is sort of a personal issue with me. Yiddish has given English a lot of wonderful, funny, expressive words, but Yiddish is not a dialect or version of Hebrew. It developed in the Middle Ages as a dialect of Middle High German. A lot of the letter combinations that make Yiddish words sound so wonderfully expressive (for example, the
sch in
schmuck) come from German. So, yes, indeed,
zaftig does sound like a German word.