When Julia emigrated to New York City from the Dominican Republic, she noticed that her Jewish friends on Long Island often playfully altered words, repeating a word and adding an SHM sound, such as changing deserve to deserve, schmeserve and cool to cool, schmool. This addition of shm- or schm- to a word in this way is what linguists call shm-reduplication or echoic dismissive shm. This construction arose in 19th century Yiddish, where the rhyming dismissive term tata, shmatta employed the words for “father” and “old rag,” and might be rendered in English father, shmather. Similarly, gelt, schmelt was used dismissively about money, suggesting money, shmoney. Another example is fancy-schmancy. A fancy-schmancy restaurant, suggesting it’s a particularly high-toned establishment, often ostentatiously or pretentiously so. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Fancy-Schmancy and Other Schm Reduplications”
Hi there. You have A Way with Words.
Hi, Martha. This is Julia, and I am calling from the tropical Champlain Valley.
I’ve been told that’s what it’s called. I’m originally from the Dominican Republic, and I came to this country when I was 10. Spanish is my first language.
And so my question, when we came, we came from the DR, as I mentioned, 31-year dictatorship there. We fled and landed in Nueva York, New York. And our second year, we moved to Long Island, pretty much to a Jewish neighborhood.
And I had a lot of Jewish girlfriends, and they did something that I thought was really cool. They would say, you go, oh, you deserve that. They go, deserve, shmoo, serve. You go, oh, that’s so cool. Cool, shmoo. And I picked this up because I thought it was really cool.
And the point was to repeat the word and, I guess, make up a nonsense word from it as a way to, I don’t know, be funny, deflect a compliment, or disagree or deflate a statement. I wasn’t, you know, I knew when to use it, but I sort of recently went in search of why, because my husband’s from Nebraska, and he never heard such a thing.
And so I said, well, I think they told me it was Yiddish. So I asked a Jewish friend, she said, no way is that Yiddish. So I thought the two people who might be able to tell me what this is would be the two of you.
Absolutely. This is a great example. Deserve shmurf. That’s a really good one. One that a lot of people will know is fancy schmancy, which by far in a way is the most common one of these. And it’s so common that it’s kind of neutral, even positive and not really negative like so many of these are.
This is known here. I’m going to throw some linguistic terms at you. This is known as schm reduplication or echoic dismissive schm. That’s S-C-H-M or S-H-M. And reduplication is when a sound or a word repeats. And echoic means when something sounds like something else. And dismissive means you’re dismissive of it. You’re kind of poo-pooing it. But let’s just call it schm for now.
Schm. Yeah, and there’s a kind of rhythm to these, right? This reduplication kind of has a da-da-da-da rhyme to it. Not a rhyme exactly, but there’s kind of a melody to it. And linguists who have looked at this have found it, have indeed found it, despite what your friends told you, in Yiddish in the 19th century, when you could say things like tata shmata, which basically meant father shmather, where the shmata meant rag. And it was what women would call their no-good husbands when they couldn’t provide for their children.
Tata, schmata. And other things like geld schmelt. Money is not everything, is basically what you’re saying. This really does exist in Yiddish. And there are examples of it in Eastern European Yiddish in the 1800s, definitely. And it shows up in English at least as early as the 1920s. Probably earlier, and before long becomes kind of trendy in slangy English and really has never fallen out of use and still is kind of, yeah, still is popular today.
Is it always like an S-H or S-C-H prefix to the second repetition or just any playful nonsense way of saying? Well, that is a wonderful question because in this particular kind of duplication where we’re using this Yiddish-derived kind of dismissive form, it is a shm, S-E-H-M, or S-H-M. But there are other kinds of this where an M is used in Farsi and Turkish and some other Middle Eastern languages where they use just an M and some other letters to kind of do a word and then a word that’s kind of modified a little bit in order to mock it, make fun of it, or to dismiss it. And so this kind of repeating a word partially, but modifying it does exist in other languages.
Wow. But not in Spanish? Or it does? Because I never heard it. A little bit, but not very common in Spanish. I don’t have any examples at hand, but I believe there are some in Spanish.
Well, this is so great. I knew you would know. Thank you. That’s great. Well, our pleasure, Julia. You sound like, what with the Dominican Spanish background and the time in the way of New York, it sounds like you’ve got a great linguistic background, so you’re bound to have more questions for us later. And so do please call.
I’ll call small. How’s that? Call small. No, definitely call. Don’t dismiss us. Oh, I really love the program. Thank you so much. Oh, Julia, it’s been a delight. Yeah. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
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