Awwww, farpotshket!

A recent post by Jody about how a simple attempt to reorganize her PC desktop resulted in chaos and devastation reminded me I’ve been meaning to post this lovely word for the past month. In an NPR commentary by Bill Langworthy called "New Words and Ideas We Need", I was introduced to the Yiddish word farpotshket. Farpotshket describes the process of trying to fix something only to make it far, far worse. This happens most often to me when trying to overhaul personal Web site stuff at 9 o’clock at night (work Web site overhauls usually involve more careful planning, the input of a skiled team, less wild impulse, and fewer, and by fewer I mean none, martinis)… usually the final, final result (at about 2 a.m.) is improvement, but there’s this awful intermediate stage (about 11:30 p.m.) where everything seems to have gone terribly wrong and I wish I’d never started trying to "fix" the problem… I’m not immune to this in the home improvement field either, and of course, trying to revise the plot of a novel from the middle often ends me up here as well…

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