A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic by El-Said Badawi and Martin Hinds, who spent many years debriefing farmers, housewives, and urban street crawlers in order to capture all the colloquial words straight from the horse’s mouth, can give infinite amounts of pleasure even to a long lapsed student of Arabic who remembers fondly their early years trying out a new word in the wild-and-crazy alleyways just outside the stiff classrooms at the American University in Cairo.
And it can be best to start with the letter “shiin” and go three more letters out from there. In Arabic expressions of algebra, “shiin” - the first letter of the indefinite noun “shay’un”, “a thing”- denotes the solvable unknown variable, our “x”. Quadriliteral roots are foreign to most words of Semitic origin, so Egyptian Arabic’s quadriliterals are usually either borrowed from outside the language or are onamatopoetic, made most often by a doubling of a biliteral root- as in the Egyptian hoopoe bird, the hudhud.
A few examples.
“shiin-qaf-lam-ba”, or shaqlib, a verb meaning to flip over, and the word-in a-sentence example given is hubb-u shaqlib ‘aql-i, his love flipped my mind.
“shiin-kaf-shiin-kaf”, or shakshik, a verb meaning to feel prickly, and “shiin-lam-shiin-lam”, or shalshil, probably derived from Coptic, meaning to pull a kerchief to and fro across the front and back of the neck as a woman’s gesture of mourning.
“shiin-lam-kha-ta”, or shilikhta, a large ugly woman, probably derived from Yiddish.
“shiin-mim-ha-ta”, or shamahti, or bully, which can also take the Turkish-derived suffix -ji (pronounced -gi in Cairene Arabic), indicating a professional, as in shamahtagi a synonym for baltagi, derived directly from Turkish, a word that became well known in the West for the street fighters involved in the downfalls of Presidents Mubarak and Mursi.
and finally…
“shiin-ya-ta-nun”, as in shaytan, the devil, as in the sentence allah yigaazi shtaan-ak!, meaning “that was very naughty of you!”, and in the adjectival form shitaani, meaning in the horticultural sense “wild”, “uncultivated”, or “"volunteer”- something like the Egyptian colloquial words that continue to bubble up in my head after all those years of sleeping next to the classical Arabic dictionary, and one of the first classical words I learned as part of an Islamic injunction- man la shaikhu lahu, shaikhuhu al-shaytan, he who has no shaikh, his shaikh is the devil.
