A correspondent asks about the relationship and comparative etymology of smooch, schmooze, and German schmusen, and I thought it was an interesting enough tangle to post. First, smooch ‘kiss,’ which OED (entry from 1986) says is a variant of smouch ‘kiss’ (e.g. 1811 “The little hideous Duc de Berri smouches us all,” Countess Granville, Letters) “Of uncertain origin […] Compare German dialect schmutzen to kiss, to smile.” Wiktionary, on the other hand, says:
Perhaps from a dialectal variation of smack. Compare also Low German smok (“a kiss, a smouch/smooch”), Alemannic German Schmutz, Schmützle (“a kiss, a smooch”).
Wiktionary has nothing on the cited German dialect forms. Now for the verb schmooze; OED (entry revised 2019): “< Yiddish shmuesn to talk, converse, chat < shmues chat, gossip (see schmooze n.).” And the noun:
Either (i) < Yiddish shmues chat, gossip < Hebrew šĕmūʿōṯ, plural of šĕmūʿah rumour < šāmaʿ to hear (see Shema n.),
or perhaps (ii) < schmooze v.
Compare earlier schmoozing n. Compare also (in different senses) smouch n.², smouse n., which ultimately reflect the same Yiddish (and ultimate Hebrew) etymon.
Notes
Compare German Schmus chat, gossip, insincere behaviour, Schmu insincere behaviour, dodgy dealings (both 19th cent.; both < Yiddish, via Rotwelsch).
I doubt Schmu has anything to do with Al Capp’s shmoo, but you never know. Thanks, Peter!
But is the etymology of both words really to Yiddish, skipping the possibility that Yiddish took these from German?
The schmooze word comes from Hebrew as described, so it’s exceedingly unlikely that Yiddish took it from German.
Are there any English words beginning with shm- or schm- that are not from Yiddish? This seems to be a consonant cluster that, while presenting no difficulty to English speakers, does not natively occur.
@rh
I think that this might be explained by palatal s in English (going back to old or at least middle English) apparently originating mainly from previous sk, where palatal s in modern German in many cases apparently originates from previous s ( compare e.g., Eng. slay and Ger. schlachten). So English shm would be from *skm and German schm from *sm. I was trying to find a reference in a handbook for this.
shmpoo ?
Ashmolean, Rushmore/Rushmoor.
Ashmolean, Rushmore/Rushmoor … Englishman, establishment, fishmonger
/ʃm/ for /sm/ is stereotypical of certain Irish accents, so that a speaker may choose a different affect by pronouncing “going for a smoke” as “going for a shmoke” (similarly “going to the Big Shmoke”).
RH did say “beginning with shm- or schm-“.
Richard Hershberger asks:
Are there any English words beginning with shm- or schm- that are not from Yiddish?
mollymooly responds:
Ashmolean, Rushmore/Rushmoor … Englishman, establishment, fishmonger
Is it fair to include sequences consisting of /šm/ if they occur word-internally, as in the six words mollymooly mentions?
If so, one would have to recognize that English has quite a number of consonant clusters hitherto unrecognized as such, for instance, Ashchurch and Ashburton (respectively names of places in England and New Zealand).
P. S. I see now that Jerry Friedman’s response to Richard Hershberger popped up while I was writing the above.
English words beginning with s(c)hm- that are prominent enough to be in AHD (excluding words from proper names such as “Schmeisser”): schmaltz, schmatte, schmear, schmo, schmooze, schmuck. All from Yiddish.
The OED adds a few more, including schm-, combining form. The ones that are not from Yiddish are:
schmelz (type of decorative glass) < German
schmerz < German
schmick: Australian colloquial (“smart, stylish”), origin uncertain
schmierkase < Pennsylvania German and German
schmutz < German and Yiddish
shmoo: “Arbitrary formation”, as mentioned by languagehat in the post
schm- reduplication, as well as Turkish m- reduplication, previously at Language Hat: Reduplicated Compounds in Turkish?
There was also considerable previous discussion about shmoos (and some about schm- vs. shm- spelling) here under The Nik of Time.
Word-initial *skm- probably didn’t exist in PIE; in the LIV² *ske- is followed directly by *skr-.
The OED prefers schm- spellings: its only shm- words are shmoo and shmegegge. Green’s likewise has only shmeez ‘to smoke good cannabis’, shmoney ‘joc. pronunciation of money’, and shmyes ‘to leave’ (plus an alternative spelling of the distinct words schmear and schmeer).
Any relation to schmutz (dirt)?
Checking “Gimson’s pronunciation of English” (5th edition by Alan Cruttenden, 1994) for the discussion of possible English syllable onsets I find this discussion of marginal cases:
The howler “/mw/ occurrs in muesli” must spring from a misapprehension that the pronunciation is /mwɛzliː/. Later editions treat it as a misprint and correct it to “/mj/ occurrs** in muesli”, but since /mj/ also occurrs in mew, mute, muse, etc., it would not have belonged at all in a list of marginal clusters.
” an example for /ʊ/ is given in later edition— “nebulous”
** retaining the misspelling
<mj> also occurs in mjsprint.
M.Uesli, John’s equally zealous younger brother, who developed a revolutionary breakfast cereal almost a century before Kellogg…..
🙂 for Y and (edit) pp.
@mollymooly: “Mwah” imitating a kiss isn’t that far below “vroom”, and “moi” (with an attempt to eliminate passages in French and a former president of Kenya) is visible on the same graph.
Initial /nw/ exists in “noir”, which is quite a bit more common than any of the above.
(I didn’t try the countably infinite spelling variations of “vroom”.)
It’s interesting that there even are initial consonant clusters that never appear in native vocabulary, yet offer no difficulty at all to native speakers.
I wonder about parallels in other languages. I can’t think of Welsh examples offhand, but I may not be trying hard enough. It’s complicated by the fact that there are nowadays few if any Welsh speakers who don’t also speak English (though there are still some older folk whose English is distinctly less fluent than their Welsh.)
No initial consonant clusters at all in Kusaal, so the question doesn’t arise. Though I suppose it’s analogous that nobody seems to have any trouble with word-initial /h/, despite the fact that [h] only appears as an allophone of non-initial /s/ in inherited vocabulary.
I have a hard time with initial -nr- (with a trilled r), of all things. Russian нравиться isn’t easy.
I’ve also seen the surname Nriagu. I don’t know how it’s pronounced in the West. Presumably it comes from Igbo Ǹrì, which has a syllabic [n̩].
Language Log: Easy but unused initial clusters?, starting from Jennie Thlunaut, a Tlingit weaver; as you might guess, the Thl- represents [ɬ] in Tlingit, but somebody assumed a spelling pronunciation of [θl] (phonetically not too far off) and found that surprisingly easy. Lots of comments on words such as mwah and vroom.
Long-standing English words have /CjV-/ only for V = //u//. In loanwords with other V, exposure to Irish encourages me to produce /CjV-/ where many anglophones have /CiV-/—though like most I do anglicise the V. Examples (with V) Bjorn (NORTH) fjord (FORCE) Mjolnir (CLOTH) Kyoto (GOAT) Hyundai (STRUT) Myanmar (TRAP).
Cluster-free fun with English phonotactics: “[ˈɾɐ̀ɾɐ̀ɾɐ̄ɾɐ̄ˌɾɐ́ɾɐ́ɾɐ̄ɾɐ̄ˈɾɐ̀ɾɐ̀ɾɐ̄ɾɐ̄ˌɾɐ́] – Batman!!!” Widely believed to be “nananana”, but listen.
Schmigadoon! (etymology unclear)
Etymology blatant:
Of course, but why the schm- ?
@dl
“Oedipus Schmoedipus”
https://languagehat.com/reduplicated-compounds-in-turkish/
I think what DM is saying is “Brigadoon Schmigadoon!” > “Schmigadoon!”, where the decision to remove the exclamation mark was a dubious one on the part of the editor.
I’ve read an account of Halloween trick-or-treating in Western Pennsylvania in which the kids’ loot was said to be referred to locally as “shwag.” Given the ethnic composition of the area, I’m going to guess that this is derived from “swag” via the process “rare word associated with a holiday = word of German origin.”
“Schwag/shwag” is also used for promotional items given away at conventions and conferences.
I vaguely knew one of the co-writers of _Schmigadoon_ once upon a time, when he was a year ahead of me in college. He grew up in what I can only imagine was a low-Yiddishisms environment: a Mormon family in Arizona. But this is perhaps evidence that the more comical genres of American writing end up being permeated by Yiddishisms regardless of the writer’s personal background.
Wiktionary asserts that shwag/schwag in the sense “low-grade marijuana” is attested in the U.S. since the 1980’s, although the earliest Green’s citation is from 1995. I can’t say that I personally recall it from the ’80’s. Green’s also offers the related “schwagged,” meaning “stoned.”
Evidently “shwag” is more widespread than I’d realized.
We can now safely reconstruct a tradition where kids visited conventions in costume and were given free marijuana.