Hakn a tshaynik
Hakn a tshaynik (literally "to knock a teakettle"; Yiddish: האַקן אַ טשײַניק), meaning to rattle on loudly and insistently, but without any meaning, is a widely used Yiddish idiomatic phrase. It is most often used in the negative imperative sense: Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik! (literally "Don't knock a teakettle at me!"; Yiddish: !האַק מיר נישט קיין טשײַניק), in the sense of "Stop bothering me!". Aside from the metaphor of the subject of the epithet, making meaningless noise as if he/she were banging on a teakettle, the phrase gains from the imagery of the lid of a teakettle full of boiling water "moving up and down, banging against the kettle like a jaw in full flap, clanging and banging and signifying nothing"; the less the contents, the louder and more annoying the noise. The phrase became familiar to many Americans without contact with Yiddish speakers by appearing in popular Three Stooges short films. In the 1936 film A Pain in the Pullman, when caught sneaking out of their rooms without paying rent, Moe tries to explain to the landlady by saying, "Well, we were just on our way to hock the trunk so we could pay you," to which Larry