
"Go figure"
(Phrase Origins)This expands to "Go and figure it out", and means: "The reasons for the fact just stated are unknown and possibly unknowable. You can waste your time thinking about what they might be, if you choose, but you're not likely to accomplish anything." (Kivi Shapiro) "Go figure" comes from Yiddish _Gey vays_ "Go know". Leo Rosten, in _The Joys of Yinglish_ (Penguin, 1989, ISBN 0-452-26534-6), says: "In English, one says, 'Go _and_ see [look, ask, tell]...' Using an imperative without any link to a conjunction is pure Yiddish, no doubt derived from the biblical phrase, translated literally: 'Go tell...' 'Go praise the Lord...' (In English this becomes 'Come, let us praise the Lord.')" Gianfranco Boggio-Togna writes: "The expressions an Italian is likely to use to show bafflement correspond exactly to "go figure": _va a capire_='go understand' or _va a sapere_='go know'. The _va a_ idiom is common in colloquial Italian." Other English expressions said to derive from Yiddish include: "Big deal!" (_A Groyser kunst!_); "Bite your tongue" (_Bays dir di tsung_); "bottom line" (_untershte shure_); "Eat your heart out" (_Es dir oys s'harts_); "Enough already!" (_Genug shoyn_); "for real" (_far emmes_); "Look who's talking!" (_Kuk nor ver s'ret!_); "make like a" (_makh vi_); "shm-" as in "Fair, shmair"; "Sez you" (_Azoy zugst du_); "Thanks a *lot*" (ironic) (_A shenem dank aykh_); "That's for sure" (_Dos iz oyf zikher_); and "Who needs it?" (_Ver darf es?_).
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