The ‘Schmuck’ Memo
I wrote the following email to the style committee of the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., in 2003 in one of my first weeks on the job. They disregarded my advice, but they did force me to join the style committee later.
I am writing to lodge my protest against the proposal to include the word “schmuck” under the “offensive language” category in the updated style guide. I believe this is limiting to writers, as it deprives them of a term which has no analogue in English, and furthermore is unnecessary, as the word is not currently regarded as vulgar.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “schmuck” is slang for “a clumsy or stupid person; an oaf.” The Oxford American College Dictionary similarly defines it as “a foolish or contemptible person.” In common English usage, its connotation is a jerk or a person who through stupid or selfish actions suffers ignominy or causes problems for others. It is also used disparagingly to refer to a generic person who lives a meaningless or worthless life.
The word is borrowed from Yiddish, the historic language of the Ashkenazic Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. Scholars disagree, but “schmuck” either has its origins in the Polish “shmok” which means “serpent” or “tail” or the German “Schmuck” which means “jewel” or “ornamentation.” In Yiddish, the word came first to refer to the penis and then adopted the meaning it now has in English. Leo Rosten, in his estimable “The Joys of Yiddish,” gives three definitions, all of which he labels obscene: 1) “penis;” 2) “a dope, a jerk, a boob; a clumsy, bumbling fellow” and 3) “a detestable fellow; a son of a bitch.”
Writing in 1967, Rosten said that the word should not be used lightly, nor in the presence of women and children. (Uneasiness about the word led to the neutered variation, “schmo” or “schmoe,” which is not technically a Yiddish word, but more of a Yiddish-English hybrid. “Schmo” enjoyed a brief heyday in the 1950s thanks in part to Al Capp’s renderings of the similarly named “shmoos,” pear-shaped blobs who were always put-upon, in his popular comic strip “L’il Abner.” With the demise of “L’il Abner” in 1977 and the increased acceptance of “schmuck,” “schmo” has lost ground, although Eminem makes use of it in his Oscar-winning song “Lose Yourself.”)
It may not be literally true that the Eskimos have a hundred words for “snow,” but it is certainly no stretch to say that Yiddish has more than its fair share of words for “loser,” “schmuck” most prominent among them. As Rosten noted, “schmuck” was “widely used by males, and with gusto; few impolite words express comparable contempt.” He cites such usages as “What a schmuck I was to believe him!” and “That schmuck fell for the stupidest trick you ever saw.” Even in Yiddish, “schmuck” conveys a much different meaning than “putz,” “schlemiel” or “schnook.”
Like those words, and others such as “shtick,” “schlep” and “schmooze,” “schmuck” entered the English language from New York City regional dialect in the early 20th century through Yiddish literature, Borscht Belt comedians and Jewish writers for television and the movies. Given such wide exposure, it has since lost much of its offensive meaning. As with many loan words, most speakers are probably unaware of its etymology. (It is doubtful, for example, that Swedish punk rockers The Hives were aware of its origins when they penned their song “Automatic Schmuck,” although Queens-based hip-hop duo Kool G Rap and D.J. Polo, who used it in 1992’s “Ill Street Blues,”, may have picked it up straight from the source, perhaps at Russ & Daughters on a Sunday afternoon.)
A search of daily newspapers for the word “schmuck” on Dow Jones returned more than 10,000 hits, although “Schmuck” is apparently a common last name (!), so the results may be misleading. (There is also a prominent sports reporter for the Baltimore Sun named Peter Schmuck, further confusing results.) However, some of the uses of “schmuck” in print were in a Washington Post review of a Norman Mailer book, calling him the “crazy uncle of American literature” and “a genius and a schmuck.” An Associated Press interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger about his former Austrian Army commander notes a time he led the Terminator into a frozen lake as a prank. “He wanted to be a schmuck,” Schwarzenegger said. In an interview with Larry King, Bill Maher said that SUV owners were selfish because their cars are dangerous and not really used for the rugged outdoors. “To me, it’s a schmuck car,” he said.
Usage of this word is also common in Hollywood. In the 1988 movie “Scrooged,” (rated PG-13), Bill Murray’s character, a repentant TV producer, says, “The Jews taught me this great word! ‘Schmuck’. I was a schmuck, and now I’m not a schmuck!” In 1987’s “Wall Street” (which probably received its R rating for more serious language and situations), one character tells another “You’ve been a real schmuck lately.” In 1983’s PG-rated “The King of Comedy,” Rupert Pupkin (played by decidedly non-Jewish actor Robert DeNiro) says “Better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime.” The word has also appeared in such differing fare as “City Slickers,” “The Omega Man,” “GoodFellas,” “RoboCop” and, naturally, several Woody Allen movies. According to the Web site CyberYenta, the word has also been used on the TV show “The West Wing.”
In a 1993 study of Yiddishisms in legal opinions for the Yale Law Review, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski and UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh noted regrettably that they could not accurately ascertain the degree to which “schmuck” had worked its way into legal English because of the number of people named Schmuck — “an unfortunate circumstance for researchers, and even worse for the poor Schmucks themselves.” (They did note that there was a U.S. Supreme Court case named Schmuck v. United States in which the petitioner was a used-car dealer.) However, they also wrote that “schmucks are even more common in courtrooms than schlemiels, schmoozing, and chutzpah,” which should give an indication, at least for the authors, of the non-vulgar usage of the word.
Moreover, this word is used commonly even here in North Carolina. A search of “News & Observer” records for the past dozen years turned up 22 uses of “schmuck” in everything from business articles to sports stories to movie reviews, including five columns by Barry Saunders and two by Dennis Rogers. Some of these examples indicate that the precise meaning of “schmuck” cannot be conveyed by English equivalents such as “moron,” “imbecile,” “nincompoop,” “nitwit” or “ding-dong.”
• In a May 12, 2002, article about marijuana that was held for a year after a police seizure and then disposed of in a county landfill, where it was stolen, a local defense attorney complained that police weren’t being held accountable “yet these schmucks who dug it up and didn’t make any money off it” faced jail time.
• An April 5, 1998, interview with the Kletter sisters, who formed a band and wrote a song about their father, a poorly educated trucker who left them when they were young to go on the lam from the law, noted their mother’s reaction to the song: “She kept playing it and saying, ‘This is a song about what a schmuck you are!’ “
• A review of the Robert Downey, Jr., vehicle “Hearts and Souls” describes a bus driver who can’t keep his eye off a man’s hand on a woman’s leg in a car riding beside the bus, causing an accident that kills himself and four passengers. The reviewer notes the four, who are now ghosts, later encounter the “bus-driving schmuck” when he too returns as a ghost.
• In a March 7, 1999, letter to the editor, a reader wrote that President Clinton had openly broken his marriage vows as well as “accepted conduct associated with public office” and would go down as the “schmuck of the century.”
• A Sept. 17, 1995, interview with a Wilmington actress noted that her career started in an off-Broadway show where she played a woman whose sole line was to say the word “food” from time to time. One night, she was given another line, the new conclusion to the show, where she was to approach the lead couple and say, “Her, beautiful; you, schmuck.” However, she didn’t know the word and pronounced it “smuck” to the raucous laughter of the New York audience. “So I go backstage,” she related, “and this friend of mine says, ‘It’s shhhhhmuck, you schmuck.’ “
In short, the word “schmuck” is commonly accepted, inoffensive and conveys a meaning which no other English word can get across. To formally declare it off-limits for the sole reason that it has a secondary meaning in its language of origin which refers to genitalia would be to fall prey to the now widely disregarded theory of etymological oppression, in which the root of a word is given the magical power to offend even those who are unaware of it. By this standard, “dork” and “wiener” — two commonly accepted words which also derive from synonyms for “penis” — should be outlawed, and we might look askance at “jazz” and “rock ’n’ roll,” which started as synonyms for sexual acts. If we are to follow this path, we may find our language inoffensive, but we will also find it dull, stultifying and colorless.
To do that, as a professional group of writers and editors, we would have to be real schmucks indeed.
