Aliens speaking Yiddish

[ruth]

I am trying to find a short story I read a long time ago (probably 30 years). It's about an Earthling who is asked by aliens to teach them colloquial English so they can pass as Earthlings and conquer the world. As you read the story you think the Earthling is betraying Earth, but in the end it turns out that what he has taught the aliens is a lot of rather rude Yiddish expressions, so they are not successful in their quest. Any ideas? I used to read a lot of anthologies of s.f. so it may have been in one of those but I don't know where to start looking...Thanks!

[Guest]

Hey Ruth,

Check out Harlan Ellison's "I'm looking for Kadak". Haven't read the sucker but the text/description below seems close to the mark..

Harlan Ellison's 1974 science fiction story "I'm Looking for Kadak" (collected in Ellison's 1976 book Approaching Oblivion) is narrated by an eleven-armed Jewish alien from the planet Zsouchmuhn with an extensive Yiddish vocabulary. Ellison courteously provides a "Grammatical Guide and Glossary for the Goyim" in which, he says, "The Yiddish words are mine ... but some of the definitions have been adapted and based on those in Leo Rosten's marvelous and utterly indispensable sourcebook The Joys of Yiddish ... which I urge you to rush out and buy, simply as good reading