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

[Mark Mandel]

(This is probably covered in those references, but here goes.) Note that
"fancy-shmancy" has been lexicalized. The original "X-shmX" construction
functions (as what? an interjection?) to dismiss the whole topic of X as
trivial in context. "Fancy-shmancy", OTOH, is an adjective semantically
equivalent to "fancy" but with a pejorative charge, belittling "fancy"-ness.

Mark Mandel


On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> 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
>

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