A Yiddish Mystery

Back in the day, when the family still owned the store, all of us grandchildren were expected to be the sort of walking advertising you just can't buy. We were all clotheshorses, and we came from a family of clotheshorses, and the family business was clothing. There were tailors and ladies dressmakers and milliners up in the branches of our family tree, and that was that. There was no questioning the edict. We were to dress well whenever we appeared in public.
This was particularly difficult for me, because I used to ride my bike twenty miles a day after school, and longer on the weekends, and it was cutoffs and tank tops on my bike. Daddy hated me to come to the store dressed like that, and, thirsty or not, it was in through the back door, and back out. No witnesses.

And then, too, it was the 60s, and I was in the first incarnation of my hippydippy dress: granny boots, maxi skirts, ponchos, crocheted things. Whenever I appeared like that, my mother and father would look at me and announce with scorn, that I was wearing a (what sounded to me like) lopsedeckle, which, they assured me, was Yiddish for "shapeless horse blanket."

Of course, my mother also swore to me that "keebebe und katchka feeder" meant pot roast. It does not. It means horse shit and duck feet, or something like that. But she always said that was what was for dinner on nights she made pot roast (which I thoroughly disliked) so, pot roast it was.

Anyway, I have been thinking a lot lately about lopsedeckles, and how the current trend towards sweater coats seems to epitomize the image. They only look good on Uma Thurman, or Gwynneth Paltrow or any other excessively willowy thing. On short, plump secretaries, they look like, well, like a horse blanket. Especially when they are made of some lumpy acrylic yarn, and they either need to be washed or have been over-(machine)-washed and dried, been sat on for hours and gotten miserably stretched out over the ass.

While I'm on the subject of acrylic, this fake fur thing has got to stop, and now. Real fur does not get matted, or nappy, doesn't look grimy and lasts and lasts and lasts. Fake fur cuffs and collars get ratty looking after the first wash, and go down hill from there.

But I digress. Because I've been thinking about the infamous lopsedeckles of my youth, and I wanted to write about them for you, I hopped on board the internets and did a quick search of Yiddish terms. Even allowing for the spelling variations (Yiddish being basically an onomatopeoic language) there is no lopesedeckle.

There is, however, this:

"Leibtzudekel - Sleeveless shirt (like bib) with fringes, worn by orthodox Jews"

That has to be it, yeah? But there must have been some sort of slang usage, because, well, because my mother and father never would have condemned me for looking like an orthodox yeshiva boy, would they?