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

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Mar 25, 2009, at 6:51 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      google-shmoogle: a query on a hard to search item
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>
> 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.

well, at least there's this:

From: wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM
Subject: not a prefix...
Date:    November 4, 2005 2:35:14 PM PST
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

2005 _Overheard in N.Y._ (Oct. 25) http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/2005_10.html
   :

Woman #1: There is no ethical dilemma! It's right there in the Bible!
Woman #2: Oh, Bible schmible.
Woman #1: Honestly, Helen. Is that the best rejoinder you can manage?
Can we possibly have just one discussion without you pulling out the
schmefix?

>  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)?

brief description in Zwicky & Pullum, "Plain Morphology and Expressive
Morphology", available here:
   http://people.ucsc.edu/~pullum/bls_1987.pdf

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