immediately

Distinctions

teikef (תיכף)

Carries both senses at once: "closely pressed together" in space and "rapidly succeeding each other" in time. Two objects set right beside one another and two events falling right after one another take the same word. This is the article's governing idea, which it says may help shed light on the set: that Hebrew, and even English, joins the spatial and the temporal, an idea the Maharal of Prague (1525-1609) had already expressed long before the space-time continuum entered physics in the last hundred years; olam (the whole world / forever) and lifnei and acharei (before and after, in place and in time) work the same way.

miyad (מיד)

Hyper-literally "from hand." What sits in a man's hand is the most readily transferred thing there is, passing straight to the next hand without an interval; so too an event that follows the one before it with nothing in between. The column adds a thought of its own, that it once wondered whether the English "off-hand" is related to miyad, so that "I don't remember off-hand" would mean "I don't immediately remember."

le'alter (לאלתר)

Some commentators, among them Rabbi Yishaya Pick-Berlin (1725-1799) and Rabbi Yaakov Emden (1697-1776), explain it as a portmanteau of al atar, "on the spot." Again a word for place doing duty for time. Some Jews have the custom of greeting one another on the first night of Rosh Hashanah with l'shanah tovah tikaseiv v'seichaseim le'alter l'chaim tovim u'l'shalom.

otyom (אותיום)

Appears once in the Mishnah, Niddah 2:2, and clearly means "immediately thereafter"; some argue the vocalization should really be evteos. Rabbi Emmanuel Chai Ricci (1688-1743), in his commentary to the Mishnah, takes it as an abbreviation of a Hebrew phrase spelling out the halachic definition of "immediately" in that sugya. Rabbi Betzalel Ronsberg (1762-1821) disagrees, pointing out that it does not square with the Gemara's conclusions about that definition, and prefers Rav Hai Gaon (in the commentary to Niddah ascribed to him), Sefer HaAruch, Rashi (Yoma 6a, Kerisos 17b) and Rashba (Toras HaBayis 7:3), who all write that otyom is actually a Greek word. The column names it: the Ancient Greek εὐθέως, eutheos, means "immediately."

Rendering guidance

• Ours, not the column's, which does not discuss the phrase: the doubled teikef umiyad (as in teikef umiyad l'geulah) is not redundancy for its own sake. Render it as an intensifier, "at once and without delay," rather than "immediately and immediately."
• Miyad on its own: "straightaway" or "at once." Keep "immediately" in reserve as the neutral fallback so it does not absorb every member of the set.
• Le'alter: "on the spot" preserves the al atar sense that Pick-Berlin and Emden give; "forthwith" is the register-neutral alternative in a halachic text.
• Otyom: transliterate and gloss, since the word's very identity is disputed. Translating it flat as "immediately" hides the machlokes between Ricci's notarikon and the Geonic-Rishonic reading of a Greek loanword.
• Trap: English has one workhorse, "immediately," and it will swallow teikef, miyad and le'alter alike. Where a passage lists them, or derives something from which one the Mishnah chose, spread them across "immediately after," "at once," and "on the spot."

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "Forthwith in the Fourth Dimension," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 25 Elul 5777 (2017-09-16), https://articles.ohr.edu/articles/forthwith-in-the-fourth-dimension; raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/7426-forthwith-in-the-fourth-dimension.md. Primary loci: Mishnah Niddah 2:2; Rashi to Yoma 6a and Kerisos 17b; Rashba, Toras HaBayis 7:3; Rav Hai Gaon to Niddah; Sefer HaAruch. The Greek εὐθέως and the "off-hand" aside are the article's own; the teikef umiyad note in Rendering guidance is ours, and is marked there.