Social Media Mavens: Beware the Norm Crosby Malaprop

This new feature comes courtesy of a friend who mentioned she’d like to add more Yiddish words to her repertoire. 
(Thanks RWR!)

Choosing the Yiddish word for this week, we came across some interesting interpretations of a word firmly enmeshed in today’s business lexicon and is often used to denote accreditation.  

Yiddish Word for the Week:  Maven  (pron. mayven): 

• An expert, often used sarcastically
• An expert or connoisseur, often specif. a self-proclaimed one
• An expert; a self-proclaimed expert. (From Hebrew mevin via Yiddish.) : A maven in the stock market you are not.

A note to all of you social media mavens out there - while Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point defines mavens as ”people we rely upon to connect us with new information”, the word may very well have originally been intended as slap in the face (as in:  I’ll give you such a zetz, your head will spin).

Who wants to weigh in on nucular vs. nuclear?