Interesting. I had a dream earlier today (last night) about going to "class" and being "giddy".
I wonder what is the Hebrew verb for the repeated bending of the back of the person reading the torah in a school or at the Kotel? I think the equivalent motion in Syrian Arabic is also called 'hajj.' By the way, hajj in Arabic has two letters which are the equivalent of the Hebrew'חג'
I don't know the official Hebrew term. The Yiddish term is "shuckling"...
regarding hiug, I always thought that this came from the old telephones, where the dial was a circle that you had to twist a certain distance for each number and wait for it to unwind before dialling the next number.
Is this the case ?
That's definitely the case. That's what I meant when I said it was an anachronism - no one dials that way any more. (The word "dial" is an anachronism in English as well.)
One of (if not the) the earliest references to shokeling is in the Kuzari (Book II Pt. 79).
Although originally in Arabic, the Ibn Tibbon Hebrew translation reads as follows:
אמר הכוזרי: אשאלך כעת היודע אתה סבה לדבר שהיהודים מתנועעים בשעת קריאתם בספרים עבריים:
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