Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods - Tapa dura

A humorous history of the Yiddish language from the middle ages to today traces the origins of numerous everyday terms, citing events throughout the past one thousand years that contributed to Jewish European communication practices while offering insight into Yiddish relationships with nature, sex, food, and more.

The entry for kvetchn (the verbal form) in Uriel Weinreich's Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary reads simply: “press, squeeze, pinch; strain.” There is no mention of grumbling or complaint. You can kvetch an orange to get juice, kvetch a buzzer for service, or kvetch mit di pleytses, shrug your shoulders, when no one responds to the buzzer that you kvetched. All perfectly good, perfectly common uses of the verb kvetchn, none of which appears to have the remotest connection with the idea of whining or complaining. The link is found in Weinreich’s “strain” which he uses to define kvetchn zikh, to press or squeeze oneself, the reflexive form of the verb. Alexander Harkavy’s 1928 Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary helps make Weinreich’s meaning clearer. It isn’t simply to strain, but “to strain,” as Harkavy has it, “at stool,” to have trouble doing what, if you’d eaten your prunes the way you were supposed to, you wouldn’t have any trouble with at all. The connection with complaint lies, of course, in the tone of voice: someone who's kvetching sounds like someone who’s paying the price for not having taken his castor oil---and he has just as eager an audience. A really good kvetch has a visceral quality, a sense that the kvetcher won't be completely comfortable, completely satisfied, until it’s all come out. Go ahead and ask someone how they’re feeling; if they tell you, “Don't ask,” just remember that you already have. The twenty-minute litany of tsuris is nobody’s fault but your own.

---from Born to Kvetch