"shmooze"

[Joel S. Berson]

Thanks, Alice and Geoff.  The "attempt to influence" sense is what I
was (mis)recollecting and misrepresenting.

Joel

At 11/6/2009 09:59 AM, Geoffrey Nathan wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>My use of the word does not have any sense of 'idly', but rather one
>of social lubrication, with the occasional connotation of 'chat up'
>or 'attempt to influence'.
>
>Incidentally, the spelling of the word raises political issues that
>you don't want to step in unless you want to start a
>fight.  <political stance>The spelling with 'c' has a German
>connotation, and, of course, Yiddish is NOT German but a sister
>language.  The politically correct spelling is a semi-phonemic YIVO
>standard in which [S] (voiceless palato-alveolar  fricative) is
>spelled <sh> and [x] (voiceless velar fricative) is spelled
><kh>.</political stance>  Of course, in that case it should be
>'shmuz', since English weird spelling is to be avoided also.
>
>Geoffrey S. Nathan
>Faculty Liaison, C&IT
>and Associate Professor, Linguistics Program
>+1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT)
>+1 (313) 577-8621 (English/Linguistics)
>
>----- "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET> wrote:
>
> > From: "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> > Sent: Friday, November 6, 2009 8:57:59 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> > Subject: "shmooze"
> >
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> > Subject:      "shmooze"
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Does "shmooze" (or as I would spell it, "schmooze") mean "chat", as
> > the Hebrew Union College survey overview says, or "chat idly" -- that
> > is, with the sense of putting off something more important?
> >
> > Joel
> >
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