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

[Baker, John]

        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


-----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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