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

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Wed Mar 25 13:51:25 UTC 2009


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

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list