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

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 9:51 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> 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)?

A search on "shm-reduplication" or "schm-reduplication" should do the trick.


--Ben Zimmer

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