Word: chutzpa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...worry. The book is still lull of gems. For those who need definitions of Yiddishisms that have crept into everyday use, Rosten provides examples, many with a fond patina of age: chutzpa is a case of "a man who, having killed his mother and father, asks the court for mercy because he is an orphan, poor schlemiel is a man who "falls on his back and breaks his nose." Some lines are cosmic as well as comic: "The rich have heirs, not children." "Good men need no recommendation and bad men it wouldn't help...
...Israelis have the edge in pilot skill, plane performance and radar- and radio-control systems. That has bred in them a measure of cockiness and that hard-to-define quality known as chutzpa, or sheer gall. Colonel Uri Yarom, an Israeli helicopter pilot, once gave a classic demonstration of chutzpa when he was dispatched to evacuate an injured sailor from an Israeli freighter in the Mediterranean. Yarom's gas ran low before he could find the freighter; noticing that U.S. helicopters were landing aboard the 40,000-ton Sixth Fleet carrier Wasp, Yarom followed them onto the deck...