(strictly) vonce

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:32 PM -0500 7/22/05, Mullins, Bill wrote:
>  l
>>
>>  I believe the writer is referring to "vantz", Yiddish for
>>  'bedbug' (German is "wanze"). I know that jazz musicians have
>>  borrowed some Yiddish terms (e.g., "schmaltz"), but it
>>  doesn't seem plausible that "doing the vonce"
>>  means "doing the bedbug". The "bedbug" derivation doesn't
>>  really work for the other senses of "vonce" either. (But who
>>  knows? Maybe Lester Young heard a Yiddish speaker calling a
>>  mischievous kid a "vantz" and he just liked the sound of it!)
>>
>
>German for "tail" is Schwanz, I believe. Perhaps relevant?

And here I was thinking it was from the Yiddish-English for a
one-night-stand: "shtrickly vonce" (rhymes with "dunce"), the ordinal
number in the series whose next member is "mebbe tvais".

Larry