"Referendum, Shmeferendum" used by an Amman news site

[Dan Goncharoff]

I suspect that most of the staff, especially the writers, are native
English speakers, and would be more familiar with colloquial English than
you apparently think.
DanG


On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 8:22 AM, Martin Kaminer <martin.kaminer at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Martin Kaminer <martin.kaminer at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Referendum, Shmeferendum" used by an Amman news site
>
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>
> On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 7:52 PM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com>
> wrote:
> > I don't know about Arabian websites, but I thought the sh- rhyme was
> > pretty standard, at least in the US.
>
> Seems there are good reasons why it has become familiar in the US and
> none of those would apply to Jordan . . . to me it seems every bit as
> odd as if a popular American news site used some lengthy and ornate
> Arabic construction in the headline to communicate the thesis of the
> article.
>
> My wife made the point that the construction was memorably imported
> into Israel by David Ben Gurion and his "Um-Shmum" comment about the
> UN but hard to believe that this in and of itself could establish
> sufficient familiarity.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Um-Shmum
>
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