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

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:37 PM -0400 3/25/09, Mark Mandel wrote:
>(This is probably covered in those references, but here goes.) Note that
>"fancy-shmancy" has been lexicalized.

That's what I had in mind below in calling it conventionalized, but
the different semantics is worth noting directly.

>The original "X-shmX" construction
>functions (as what? an interjection?) to dismiss the whole topic of X as
>trivial in context.

As in the various one-liners along the lines of "Ethnic-shmethnic, as
long as he's Jewish" or "Catholic-Shmatholic, as long as she's rich".

LH

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