Introduction to Making.

Ben Yagoda discusses a niche usage that produces hilarity among a restricted group of English-speakers:

In the language wars, I am pretty firmly a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist) but even descriptivists have pet peeves, and one of mine is basketball announcers who refer to “made three-pointers,” “made baskets,” and “made field goals.” My problem here is redundancy—three-pointers, baskets, and field goals have by definition been made. But a separate issue is I find those phrases funny. Along with referring to a basket as a “make.”

To give you a sense of why, I quote from a message sent in 2017 to the language columnist of the Jewish magazine Tikvah, who has the pen name Philologus. The correspondent, an academic dean at MIT, wrote:

Last year, I found myself in a meeting at which the head of the entrepreneurship center was describing a new course he was excited about. Related to what has lately been described as the “Maker Movement,” it was to be a joint project of the Management and Mechanical Engineering departments that was supposed to get engineers and managers more involved in manufacturing by closing the gap between designs and products.

After stating this in his introductory remarks, the proposed giver of the course then announced its name: “Intro to Making.”

This cracked the dean up. However, he reported, “when I looked around the room, I saw that no one was smiling but me.”

Here is my litmus test. You will find “Intro to Making” and “made baskets” funny if you are a (say) 50-plus-year-old person from an Ashkenazi Jewish background and/or the New York City metropolitan area; and/or you write movies or TV shows (rubbing shoulders with many a Jew); and/or you are an avid reader of the books of Judy Blume.

Such people, you see, understand “make” as a word used to and by children (and in reference to pets) meaning “defecate.” Use it in a sentence? Sure: “I have to make,” “She is making,” “Did Fido make?” […]

It may seem that I am harping on Jewishness but it is key. Specifically, the usage comes from the Yiddish word makhn, meaning “to make.” Philologos writes in Tikvah that the defecate meaning isn’t given in most Yiddish dictionaries, but

it is listed as a toilet term in Nahum Stutchkoff’s compendious thesaurus Der Oytser fun der Yiddisher Shprakh. When I asked a friend who is a native speaker of Yiddish to confirm this, she wrote back: “Yes, we did say makhn in our very refined family. As far as I know, the verb never took a direct object. It referred only to defecation, not urination.”

And this in turn derives from the German word for make. I asked my friend and neighbor Hansjakob Werlen, a professor of Germanic studies at Swarthmore College about this, and he replied, “The term machen when on the toilet, especially kids, does indeed indicate a successful completion of Nr 2.”

This usage somehow managed to elude me, despite my long residence in NYC; is it familiar to you?