Israeli Slang U Gotz ta Know

Look, it should surprise no one that there's a certain, perfectly serviceable (if somewhat antiseptic) lexicon you learn in Ulpan (Hebrew school) and an entirely different, juicier, and plain old nastier set of words you learn just being out and about in the city--fending off guys at the bars, elbowing your way to the front of the Sabieh line (Oh, Sabieh, if heaven could be contained in a pita it would taste just like you.), listening to the chants and boasts of the fruit sellers at the shuk, and separating two warring kita hey (6th grade) boys after their insults give way to blows.

These are some of the latter:

"Die!": One of the most jarring exhortations to hear directed your way when you're a new Hebrew speaker, the homonym actually means, "Enough (already)!" It's a good word to know if you're regularly required to quiet classrooms of screaming children, but also effective when hissed at a hovering makeup counter lady. Apparently it's also the command Israeli dog-owners use to quiet their barking dogs, but since mine is hopelessly monolingual (on his best days) I don't have any first-hand knowledge of the usage.

"Efshar?" and Yesh Matzav?": "Efshar?" literally means, "It is possible?" and it's a nice way to ask someone to move their stuff so you can sit down on a crowded city bus, or to request a favor of any kind. However, it's also often asked of girls in bars by shady-looking dudes (often "Arrseem" see below)who want to dance with (i.e. dry hump) them. Same thing goes with "Yesh Matzav," which literally translates to the ominous-sounding "There's a situation," but really means, "There is a chance," and is generally phrased as a question and used to ask for a dance, a cigarette, or a phone number (generally by someone to whom you'd deny all three).

"Arrs" (or in its plural form, Arseem): A type of guy who might resist precise definition but whom, as in pornography, you know when you see. Generally an "arrs" (another false homonym for English-speakers, however a far more accurate one) is an overly-groomed, jewelery-wearing, hair-product-using, designer-jeans-buying young man out on the prowl, whose hands seem to be constantly occupied with a cell phone, a cigarette, a drink, or some combination of the three. Lifelong Tel-Aviv residents seem eager to brand the suburbanite males who come into the city on weekends to pack the Namal nightclubs and clog Rothschild Blvd as Arrseem, leading me to conclude that these must be the equivalent of the New York "Bridge and Tunnel" crowd. You've been warned.

Faltzani: Okay, to be fair, I've never heard this one used in conversation, and I'm pretty sure it's outdated as far as slang goes, but the etymology of it is so fantastic (and so resolutely Israeli)that I couldn't resist mentioning it (one of my fellow teachers filled me in on it). A "Faltzani" is an egotist, someone who thinks too highly of himself and acts snobbishly.

It's derived from the verb Ha'fleetz, which means to pass gas.