My grandmother spoke Yiddish and knew little or no English. But we managed to communicate in the ways of people who loved one another.

She did not live to see my blogging and social media world, but it would have been familiar to her in many ways.

The yenta is a formidable figure in Jewish History. Yentas consider everything their business, and no one is safe from criticism or unwanted advice.

Today, yentas are once again a regular feature of my life.

My grandmother complained about the yenta-kvetches all the time; she was always fending off busybodies, intrusive relatives, and people who love to find and share bad news and gossip.

She prided herself on minding her own business and refusing to judge other people (except Richard Nixon.)

I learned to identify these people because when they came over to my grandmother’s house, they would talk excitedly in Yiddish, and when they live, she would roll her eyes, spit three times to ward off the evil eye, and turn to me and sigh:

“Eiyee,” Johny, a yenta kvetch!”

Yentas don’t follow most rules of etiquette. They are loud, intrusive, and refuse to be criticized, corrected,  or deterred. I think the yenta’s I knew considered themselves holy extensions of God, tasked with setting others straight.

My grandmother said some other things, but I suspect they were curses in Yiddish; I didn’t understand them, she refused to translate them.

The yenta-kvetch is a yenta with some sting and a chip on her (mostly they were women then, but online, there are plenty of men embracing this work now) shoulder.

In fact, “yenta-kvetch” are among the very few Yiddish sayings or phrases that I picked up as a child and remembered.

Both terms are in the dictionary.

A yenta is loosely defined as “blabbermouth” or “gossip.” Synonyms for yenta are circulator, gossip, gossiper, newsmonger, tale-teller, talebearer, tell tales.

A “kvetch” is a habitual complainer: synonyms are beach, bitch, bleat, carp, complain, crab fuss, gripe, grizzle, grouch, grouse, growl, mumble, moan, whimper, whine, wail.

I was never very good at languages, and the women in my family would always switch to Yiddish when the conversation got interesting so the children would have no idea what was happening in their lives or the world.

My grandmother often spoke in her own tight circle about what has ironically become one of the deepest and richest strains on the World Wide Web: the “Yenta-Kvetch.”

I never expected to see them when I grew up and moved away. They are forbidding. They are multiplying like mice online of all places.

They tell me what to wear, what to buy, what to feed our animals, how to treat Maria. They correct my spelling errors, root out typos, ask me what brand I bought, and then tell me it is too expensive or flawed in some way.

There are political yentas, animal rights yentas (on the nasty side of yentahood), livestock yentas, food and marriage yentas, and life yentas.

The yenta-kvetches are the ones I fight the most with, the ones telling me I am not nice enough, or what to write, or how their sister Sarah died the most horrible disease from diabetes.

A yenta kvetch from Minnesota wrote to send me a long and detailed list of every person she ever knew who had toes and feet removed because they didn’t take care of their diabetes. “Pay attention to this,” she scolded. Yentas are not the most sensitive people.

I used to think of people like that as trolls or busybodies, but in recent weeks the voice of the yenta stirred up the sometimes faint memories of my youth. Now, they are no longer a Jewish issue; we all belong to them online.

They include every faith and belief system, the only thing they all have in common really is social media.

I hear from them almost every day.

They did something my grandmother never did; they have embraced new technology. In some ways, it was made for them; I feel they secretly helped create it, they may have been looking for was to grow and dominate.

Social media is ubiquitous, and so are the Yenta Kvetchers,  the meddlers and complainers of the modern world.

When I bought my handy snow blower, the yentas told me it was not powerful enough; it was too expensive, it wouldn’t work in upstate New York. Get the gasoline kind, wrote one, her Uncle Sam loved his before he keeled over of a heart attack.

Yenta-Kvetches online can be men or women. Just yesterday, Steven Zagres posted this message about a claim I made that a post of mine had gone viral: “A few thousand shares on Facebook is “going viral on the Internet.” Wow. Get over yourself, Jon!”

Steven was correct. When I started writing online, a few thousand shares meant going viral; It takes much more than that now. I corrected it. Wow, indeed.

I’m not sure how to get over myself; it’s the only self I have.

Steven could have simply pointed out my mistake to me, but he also had to complain about it, as if he had been victimized somehow by my ego. That is the voice of the yenta- kvetch. All of my foibles and mistakes are personal, aimed at them.

As my grandmother pointed out, they never have anything good to say about anybody. They don’t do compliments.

But it was the tone that gave Steven away. He is a kvetch, if not a yenta. But you don’t need to be Jewish any longer to be a yenta-kvetch; you just have to have WI-FI.

The yenta has long been associated with Jews. On the sixth season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David called Ted Danson, a “yenta.” Jewish children are often told not to be such a yenta when they ask grownups too many questions.

As I am wont to do, I started searching online and in my books for some yenta history. Of course, there was some.

I searched online through the most definitive Yiddish dictionary of all — Dr. Uriel Weinrieich’s Modern English-Yiddish Dictionary. He defines a “yenta” as a vulgar/sentimental woman. Another Yiddish dictionary offered five definitions for yenta: a gossipy woman, a blabbermouth, someone who can’t keep a secret, a vulgar and ill-mannered woman, a shrew, or a man who acts as the above women do.

It’s true that the yentas who e-mail me are not above cursing, but I can’t say most are vulgar.

Wikipedia had a completely different sense of the term.

They say “Yenta”  is a Yiddish woman’s given name, a variant of the name Yentl, ultimately thought to be derived from the Italian word gentile, meaning “noble” or “refined.” The name, they said, has entered what is called “Yinglish” – i.e., become a word referring to a woman who is gossip or a busybody.

Jewish historians say the use of the word yenta as a word for “busybody” came about after the humorist Jacob Adler, writing in the Jewish Daily Forward in the 1920s and 30’s, wrote a series of comic sketches featuring the character Yente Telebende a henpecking wife.

Jewish or not, if you are online much,  you will hear from them, or have heard from them already.

I may be one of the first bloggers to associate the term yenta with the rapid rise of busybodies and scolds and critics on the Internet. If Jacob Adler could change the content of the term, maybe I can too, because the definition of “yenta” sure fits many of the people I hear from regularly.

My theory is that every family has a yenta-kvetch, a grandma, aunt, neighbor, uncle, or sister somewhere around. Social media is a gift from God to the yenta-kvetch, for many tears of modding and whining and complaining.

Here are my give-aways for identifying the yenta-kvetch:

The yenta-kvetch loves to give advice, but it is almost always bad—bad advice about dogs, bad advice about food, bad advice about the cost of things, dreadful advice about health care.

I realized recently that if I followed the advice of the yentas closely, every person or animal I know and love would be dead many times over.

People with reasonable advice offer it as a suggestion; the yenta-kvetch only gives commands:

“You must worm your lamb immediately!” (The vet says, “worming is not usually recommended for the Northeast. I’d wait on that.”

The yentas came after me yesterday when I wrote that I was going to a manicurist on Monday.

Diabetics, they said, should never go to a manicurist, they didn’t know what they were doing and could hurt my feet. Many of them were diabetics who had taken a hospital course on diabetes.

I resisted the urge to invite them to come and trim my feet. Or to tell them a doctor had suggested my going. We’ll see how it goes.

One yenta told me my dog food (she saw in a pantry photographed)  killed her neighbor Sophie’s chihuahua,”get rid of it immediately.” One kvetch scolds me for taking Zinnia for rides in the car; she could suffocate if I closed the windows, I am told.

One e-mailed me to suggested her favored diet for diabetics. She told me to use it every day. I showed it to my doctor; she said the diet would kill me in a week or two.

Then, there are the correction yenta-kvetches. They kind of work for me. I use a proofreading program that makes more mistakes than I do, and I am Dyslexic.

So there will be some typos. And there is no shortage of pissed-off retired English Teachers on the Internet, and along with the yenta kvetches, I am covered.

I don’t really even need my proofreading software. My typos don’t get to live long. The yentas of the word kill them.

I must say that yenta-kvetches are good, if not necessarily nice, editors. They seem to be well-educated and meticulous. They read every word. I exploit them when I can.

Often yentas fight for correction credit. One woman lambasted me for fixing a typo without giving her credit for being the first one to tell me. She insisted it was her correction I followed.

Also, beware of the yenta’s Uncle Harry and Aunt Beulah stories. Their experiences rarely have any revelation to your experiences. But don’t tell the yentas that.