You can either laugh or cry at the idea that in America, it has been suggested that I can no longer write that I love the big skies without some peckerhead thinking of a lawsuit.

Orwell lives and lives.

Two Montana men were offended by my use of the term and told me so (digitally), insisting that their sky was much bigger than mine.

I have never won that argument, especially not from a Montana man. Their sky is more significant than mine. It’s bigger. But unless I move there, which they would like even less, my hands are tied.

All wars, I think, are sparked by greed or testosterone, two dominant qualities of many men. Yours is almost certainly bigger than mine, Jim, I happily concede.

I’m proud of what I have, both down there and up in the sky.

Route 61 is also where my favorite farmhouse is, the most beautiful farm I have seen up here, and it sits just below one of my big skies.

The sky in this valley is my favorite big sky to photograph, along with Beadle Mountain Road. The clouds just seem to dance.

There are many beautiful hills and mountains where I live, but not too much big sky, so I treasure it where I can find it.

Whenever I see a troubled or angry, or beautiful sky, I head for Route 61, a mountain and two hills away.

I wanted to post the photo I took there yesterday, but I also want to write about my revelations in bed last night about the “Yenta-Kvetches,” who roam the Internet spreading gossip, bad news, and alarm. It seems my genius for drawing controversy has struck again.

My grandmother was always warning me about them, but I didn’t make the connection between her “yentas” and our Internet until recently. It makes perfect sense.

Several idiots desecrated my blog yesterday by suggesting Montana could sue me for claiming there was big sky anywhere else, the state has trademarked the term to keep other tourist destinations from stealing it.

I use the term extensively when describing the skies in my photos.

And I will certainly keep using the term; I hope to photograph the Montana Sheriff who will appear one day on a white stallion with some deputies and who traveled all over the country to arrest me and insist I come up with a new term for my clouds. His horses will be bigger than my sweet donkeys.

(You guys will have to post bail for me.)

One of the posters claimed to an intellectual property lawyer, and he suggested I might be violating Montana’s “Big Sky” trademark, which is painted on every license plate in the state. God have mercy on his clients. Kvetches can be both male and female,  young and old.

And, of course, these yenta-kvetches don’t know what they are talking about, which is another of their trademarks. Truth is for rabbis and priests and does not matter.

(Trademarks protect commercial property and profit; they are not used to tell writers what words to use in their journals and memoirs unless the writer wants to take tourists away from Montana and has cost the state money.)

So this brings me to the meaning of the yenta-kvetch, which, I am only realizing, is the perfect name for the pandemic of obnoxious, ill-informed, and nasty people who flock to the Internet like mosquitoes at an August barbecue.

Gossips and yentas used to have to get their ammunition in face-to-face conversations with other yentas. Now, they have the whole world at their fingertips thanks to computers. Social media is yenta heaven. They can make things up and just send them off for free, not even the cost of a postage stamp.

So what is a yenta-kvetch?

My grandmother would have called the kind of people who send me dumb and mindless messages like the Montana men and two women did Yenta K’vetchs. I get them almost every day. I ignore many, but I confess torturing them in some way seems a civic duty to me.

This is a Yiddish term, one of very few I learned as a child in a Jewish household. My grandparents spoke only Yiddish, and my grandmother loved to tell me stories I could barely understand.

She often mentioned the yenta-kvetches, though, and never with admiration. When she referred to somebody as a yenta-kvetch, she would spit two or three times over her shoulder to bring the evil eye down upon them. She claimed it works.  God, she said, hated yenta-kvetches, but she never revealed her source.

When I was young, all the women at the dinner table would switch to Yiddish to talk freely without the children understanding what they were saying. I often heard the term “yenta-kvetch” pop up and remembered it.

Both terms are actually in the dictionary.

A yenta can be many things, but it is often used to describe gossips, blabbermouths, or people who love to mind other people’s business; their information is invariably false, and they traffic in numerous alarms and live off of outrage and lament.

They love to tell their victims how to live.

Sound familiar?

The kvetches are all online now, they don’t even have to walk down to the butchers. If you go on Facebook or a blog or Instagram for ten minutes, you will run into one. They are everywhere, and they love terrible news more than anything. They represent all ages, faiths, and origins.

In a sense, the YK’s were Trumpists long before a Trump existed. They are full of grievances and complaint.

It is striking how the words describe countless people on social media.

Yenta-kvetches give unwanted and often awful advice,  traffic in hysteria, believe everyone’s business is their own, and live to correct others.

A “yenta” is an inveterate gossip; a” kvetch” complains obsessively and habitually, another trait of the social media yentas. Together, these are powerful words. The yenta, like the cockroach, thrives and survives.

Before the Internet, the yenta-kvetch’s were an occasional annoyance. Now that they have their free medium. The yenta-kvetch has evolved into a way of life and a universal plague.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner, but my beloved grandmother – she gave me much love and wisdom – had the right idea.

When the next yenta-kvetch pops up on my blog, I will spit over my shoulder three times and turn him or her into a cricket.