Claim:
U.S. Sen. JD Vance's last name means "bedbug" in Yiddish.
Rating:
Mixture ( About this rating? )
What's True:
The Yiddish word "vants" means bedbug.
What's False:
However, "Vance" and "vants" are not necessarily pronounced the same.
After former U.S. President Donald Trump announced Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate in the 2024 presidential election, online users researched Vance's political positions and background, theorizing on the potential impact he could have on the race.
During that research, a few people commented on a purported linguistic coincidence: The senator's last name apparently means "bedbug" in Yiddish.
Using a Yiddish-English dictionary, we confirmed Vance's last name indeed sounds similar, albeit not identical, to the Yiddish word for "bedbug."
Yiddish is written in the Hebrew script, not the Latin alphabet. As such, we needed a dictionary to provide transliterated Yiddish in order to compare the two words. Many online Yiddish-English dictionaries we found only provided Yiddish written in the Hebrew script, complicating our research. However, we eventually found a dictionary administered by the University of Kentucky that provides transliterated Yiddish. By searching it for "bedbug," results displayed the Yiddish word "vants."
In order to double-check that finding, we investigated the origins of the word "vants." For a long time, Yiddish was the primary language of Ashkenazi Jewish people across central and eastern Europe, and a good portion of the language's vocabulary and structure comes from German. So, we looked up "bedbug" in German: " die Wanze ." German pronunciation rules dictate that a German "W" is pronounced like an English "V."
In other words, since the word "vants" likely came from German, that language's translation of "bedbug" ("die Wanze") is further evidence to corroborate the claim.
The Forward , an English-language publication for Jewish readers, also confirmed this fact.
However, there is one major caveat: pronunciation. As the Forward noted, the word was the subject of a joke in the '70's sitcom "MASH." But, in the clip, the Yiddish word "vants" is pronounced with a long "a" sound, closer to the "o" in "cot," as opposed to the "a" sound in "cat" that is typically used to pronounce Vance's name. Depending on a speaker's accent, those two sounds might be pronounced similarly , or they may sound very different.
That said, they're close enough to homonyms that anyone trying to make an easy joke can consider the claim at least partly factual.
Sources:
"About JD Vance."
J.D. Vance , https://www.vance.senate.gov/about/. Accessed 17 July 2024.
Bedbug . 17 July 2024, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-german/bedbug. Hall-Lew, Lauren, et al. "San Francisco English and the California Vowel Shift."
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , vol. 2015, https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2015/Papers/ICPHS0591.pdf. Herchenroeder, Katie. "Donald Trump Picks Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as His Vice Presidential Nominee."
Vanity Fair , 15 July 2024, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-jd-vance-vice-president-pick. Pollack, Chana. "Why Are Yiddish Speakers Talking about J. D. Vance and Bedbugs?"
The Forward , 16 July 2024, https://forward.com/forverts-in-english/633510/jd-vance-bedbugs-vants-yiddish/. Slattery, Gram, et al. "Trump Picks Onetime Critic J.D. Vance, Now a Fierce Defender, as His Running Mate."
Reuters , 15 July 2024.
www.reuters.com , https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-picks-onetime-critic-jd-vance-now-fierce-defender-his-running-mate-2024-07-15/.
Wanze - English translation in English - Langenscheidt dictionary German-English . https://en.langenscheidt.com/german-english/wanze. Accessed 17 July 2024.
Yiddish Dictionary Lookup . https://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/dictionary.cgi. Accessed 17 July 2024.
Yiddish Language | History, Culture & Alphabet | Britannica . 9 July 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Yiddish-language.
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