Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as "gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible 'guts', presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to".
In the same work, Rosten also defines the term as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan".
[9] The cognate of ḥuṣpāh in Classical Arabic, ḥaṣāfah (حصافة), does not mean "impudence" or "cheekiness" or anything similar, but rather "sound judgment".
Moses engages God with fierce moral logic: Sovereign of the Universe, consider the righteousness of Abraham and the idol worship of his father Terach.
Rabbah, Hukkat XIX, 33)Trained to view God as an unyielding authoritarian proclaiming immutable commands, we might expect that Moses will be severely chastised for his defiance.
was the headline of an article in Haaretz,[13] by Amos Harel, their military and defense analyst in both Hebrew and English,[14][15] in February 2023.
[13] Judge Alex Kozinski and Eugene Volokh in an article entitled Lawsuit Shmawsuit, note the rise in use of Yiddish words in legal opinion.
[16] Chutzpah first appeared in a Supreme Court decision in 1998, in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, when Justice Antonin Scalia used it to describe the NEA's brazenness in asking for government funding.
[17] The Polish word hucpa (pronounced [ˈxut͜spa]) is also derived from this term, although its meaning is closer to 'insolence' or 'arrogance', and so it is typically used in a more negative sense instead of denoting a positive description of someone's audacity.