Noun: luftmensch
| Singular | luftmensch |
| Plural | luftmenschen |
Sample Sentences
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My wife is such a luftmensch she missed our anniversary dinner because she was too busy reading her books!
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Chagall was a luftmensch, he says, a man of the air... [March 24, 2007, Helen McLean, “Marc of Distinction”, in The Globe and Mail, Books, page D6:]
Nouns inflected like luftmensch
sea-ox,
übermensch,
Indian ox,
Untermensch,
grey ox,
Aufklärung,
near ox,
ahlspiess,
Festschrift,
grunting ox,
Herr,
abendmusik,
üntermensch,
shrub ox,
untermensch,
Lebenswelt,
pannekoek,
Völkerwanderung,
omafiets,
luftmensch, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
From Yiddish לופֿטמענטש (luftmentsh), from לופֿט (luft, “air”) + מענטש (mentsh, “person”). Compare German von Luft und Liebe leben (“to disregard the practical matters of life”, literally “to live on air and love”), German Luftikus (“impractical, quixotic, or careless person”). The word first appeared in Yiddish literature in the 1860s (Nicolas Vallois, The Luftmentsh as an economic metaphor for Jewish poverty: a rhetorical analysis). See: German Nouns '
Luftikus'.