I don’t aspire to much in this world–just little accomplishments like abolishing the penny and reviving the diëresis.

Hopefully, I can also successfully promulgate a neologism. I coined the term she’erit a few years ago to describe the communities of Judahites left in the land after the three waves of deportation to Babylon from 598 to 582 BCE.

She’erit (שארית) literally means “left over” or “remnant.” I intended its use to be analogous to golah (גולה), which is commonly used in scholarly literature to denote the community of deportees to Babylon (and the returnees from Babylon). I hoped by using the Hebrew word to avoid the theological connotations of the English term “remnant.”

We’ll see it catches on. If you’re reading this, you’ve likely clicked a link from another one of my blog posts, or else googled it to find out what the heck I’m saying.