google-shmoogle: a query on a hard to search item

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:21 AM -0400 3/25/09, Baker, John wrote:
>         Try a search for shmancer/schmancer (I believe the spelling
>"schmancer" is more common), based on the old Yiddish joke, which dates
>back at least to the early 1940s.  That seems to be the most famous
>example of this type.  Not in ADS-L archives.
>
>
>John Baker

Thanks; I didn't find the joke, but I did find the Fran Drescher book
_Cancer Shmancer_.  Reminds me that "fancy-shmancy" is a now
conventionalized offshoot of this construction.  And thanks to Arnold
for the link to his and Geoff Pullum's paper and to Ben for the idea
of searching under shm-reduplication, which pulls up a brief
wiki-entry that includes a bibliography listing:

Feinsilver, Lillian Mermin. "On Yiddish Shm-." American Speech 36
(1961): 302-3.

Nevins, Andrew and Bert Vaux. "Metalinguistic, Shmetalinguistic: The
phonology of shm-reduplication." CLS 39 (2003).

Spitzer, Leo. "Confusion Shmooshun." Journal of English and Germanic
Philology 51 (1952): 226-33.

(Someone should add Z&P's BLS paper to the entry.)

LH



>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
>Of Laurence Horn
>Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 9:51 AM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: google-shmoogle: a query on a hard to search item
>
>I'm wondering if there have been any discussions in recent years--here,
>on Language Log, on Linguist List, or in another web or print
>resource--on the X-Shmex construction, as in "lawyer shmawyer", or maybe
>now "ponzi, shmonzi".  Actually, I know there must have been, but I have
>no idea how to search for it.  Let's see if the last one googles up
>anything...yup,  an op-ed by Safire at
>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/opinion/29safire.html in which his
>predictions of the year column for Dec. 28, 2008 includes among the
>candidates for "Non-Fiction Sleeper of the Year" a "crash-published"
>tell-all entitled _Ponzi Shmonzi: The Bernie Madoff Story_.  So anyway,
>where would I go to find a description of the construction (not just a
>list of exemplars)?
>
>LH
>
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