How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck)

by Wex, Michael

  There’s nothing wrong with saying “cancer, shmancer,” if what comes next is “I’m going to beat it” or “We just found a cure.” Take away Cohen and his self-regard, and the shm helps to diminish the disease, rather than the sufferer, and show it who’s boss: the comedienne Fran Drescher, a survivor of uterine cancer, has written a book called Cancer Schmancer (that’s her spelling, not mine) and founded an organization with the same name dedicated to ensuring “that all women with cancer are diagnosed in stage 1, when it is most curable” to turning cancer, in other words, into shmancer, something that might once have been important but isn’t anymore. The most it can do is pretend to a status that we all know it doesn’t have, in the same way as someone or something that you label as “fancy-shmancy” is not really so fancy after all: the shm explodes the pretensions of the thing, action, or quality that it modifies and then does its best to scorn these things into nothingness.

  In its attempt to make such things disappear, shm can also let you know that only a fool, an out-and-out unreconstructed idiot, could really think that the thing in question is worth talking about. It’s a distraction, a red herring—the only herring that Yiddish does not take seriously—something that has obtruded itself into a place where it shouldn’t be:

  MRS. COHEN: So, tell me, Mrs. Levy, when’s your granddaughter getting married?

  MRS. LEVY: Married, shmarried! She’s nine months old.

  “Don’t,” in other words, “be stupid. Where does marriage come to toilet training? If you can’t be bothered to start making sense, the least you could do is make sure not to talk.”

  The path from shtekele to shmekele, from sht to shm, leads from childish whimsy to childish knowingness: regardless of what adults might think, kids can not only tell the difference between image and reality, they can also figure out which parts of their bodies will make grown-ups wrinkle their noses as much as the pee-pee and poo-poo that come out of those parts. They are learning to use these parts for comic effect, especially those of little boys, who have something that they can point and wave solely for the sake of fun.

  Now, shmekele, the-little-stick-that-isn’t, is what linguists call a second-degree diminutive. If Mike is the first-degree diminutive of Michael, Mikey, the diminutive of Mike, is a second-degree diminutive. If shmekele is a second-degree diminutive, there should also be a first-degree form, maybe a bit more serious but no whit less cutesy. Shmekl, the first-degree diminutive, does in fact exist, and is nearly as common in Yiddish as its little brother, shmekele. What’s unusual, though, is that there was no positive form, no base-word on which the diminutives depended. A shmekele was never really a diminutive shmok (the standard Yiddish form of shmuck); a shmok was an overgrown shmekele. Where the linguistic process of whittling a stick down to size begins with the full-sized shtok, which becomes a shtekl and then a shtekele, the more strictly penile progression, marked by the shm at the beginning, also works like the real thing: it starts off with something small, then teases it out to fullness.

  Shmekl is not the only Yiddish word that contempt has made big. The word sheytl, which means the wig worn by Orthodox women to hide their own hair, looks and sounds like a diminutive, even though it really is not. Unable to find a full-sized form in the language as they knew it, though, Yiddish-speakers invented one: the shoyt is a larger, hairier, more mature version of the sheytl. Since anyone who’s spent much time in the Orthodox world can spot even a good sheytl from a hundred yards off—they’re not supposed to look too much like a woman’s real hair—it isn’t surprising that shoyt is used only to refer to a sheytl that’s less fashionable, more obviously fake, much easier to spot at a distance than the average sheytl. When the diminutive is also the norm, the shoyt, which becomes monstrous by virtue of its size, is a sign of something gone grotesquely wrong.

  If enlarging a diminutive can turn a ladies’ toupee into a hunting trophy, imagine what it can do for something that can grow on its own. Shmok is to shmekl as shoyt is to sheytl—the only difference being that sheytl was always a “real” word, while shmekl was invented to make fun of shtekl and originally made no real sense without it, any more than a statement that we’d got just got back from Lost Wages would make sense to anyone who had never heard of Las Vegas. We’re dealing with a mocking deformation of shtekele that grows into an equally sardonic takeoff of the full-sized shtok from which the shtekele grew.

  Fabricating a positive form out of a humorous, baby-talk diminutive is no laughing matter; the full-sized shmok is to the child’s shmekl as the giant ants that try to destroy Los Angeles in the 1954 classic Them are to the little fellows that King Solomon tells us to emulate. “Go to the ant, o slacker,” he says in Proverbs 6:6, “behold her ways and wise up.” Go to any ant in this movie, though, and it’ll eat you alive while Edmund Gwenn (Santa Claus in the original Miracle on 34th Street) stands helplessly by and watches. What’s cute and instructive and ecologically helpful when it’s half an inch long is entirely different when it grows to nine feet.

  A shmekele is small and cute and can sometimes be very funny. Its owner might wave it around once in a while, and the absolute worst it can do is to give the owner himself and anyone in the line of fire a good soaking. With respect to Jewish life, it’s the only visible sign that a child too young to wear a yarmulke or ritual fringes is in fact a Jew. “Small is beautiful” comes to an end at roughly the same time as the shmekele, grown considerably larger, becomes capable of more than what Chaucer called “purgacioun of uryne.” By the time we get to shmok, the shm is simply the first part of the word, as it is in such other well-known Yiddish terms as shmatte or shmooz, in which the shm has no connection with the pejorative prefix. Shmok becomes a word like any other, only dirtier. Technically speaking, shmok masquerades as the full-sized, positive form from which the diminutives shmekl and shmekele are derived: compare a boy four or five years old who goes up to the lady next door and announces proudly, “I have a penis,” to a man of thirty who does the same thing. That’s the difference between a shmekl and a shmok.

  II

  AS BOTH THE ant and the penis teach us, enlarging a diminutive, blowing it up as if life and speech were photo labs, can turn something that used to be cute into something unpleasant and often frightening. Growth alone, though, doesn’t account for the aura of really distasteful obscenity that still clings to shmuck in Yiddish. Where such English terms as prick and dick can hardly be called sophisticated, using them in polite company to refer to either a penis or a person will cause real offense only if the person, his penis, or some of his friends and family are present. The speaker’s breeding, education, and social skills might be called into question; his choice of words might be labeled inappropriate, but not as overtly offensive as asshole or worse, cunt, would have been in the same conversation. Shmuck’s power to offend derives from its deeper cultural context, from a couple of unusual features of Jewish religious and cultural life.

  The most significant of these is the central importance of circumcision in Jewish life. As the only ritual that the religion itself considers indispensable—the word orel, “man with a foreskin,” is a synonym for gentile in both Hebrew and Yiddish—circumcision was until recently considered the infallible sign of the Jew throughout Europe and the Americas. This identification of circumcision with Judaism, the idea that a man’s penis can determine the nature of his relationship with God, invests the child’s shmekl with a significance and allure that might not be immediately apparent to adherents of other faiths. It’s not unusual for a Yiddish-speaking mother to lift up the baby boy whom she’s diapering and, while cataloging the rest of his body parts and their beauty, wax just as dithyrambic over what she will inevitably call his kosher shmekele, his kosher little shmekl, the one body part that, even for the baby’s mother, has more to do with Mount Sinai than with cocktail weenies, no matter how strictly kosher the latter.

  An equally powerful tradition, the role of which is slightly less easy to discern at first glance, is th
e Jewish refusal—strictly speaking, the Jewish inability—to utter the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God that is said to be His only real name. It’s what God calls Himself when He’s at home. So powerful is the prohibition against saying it—when the Temple was still standing, no one but the High Priest was allowed to utter it, and even he could do so only on Yom Kippur—that the secret of its pronunciation was lost after the Temple was destroyed: you couldn’t say it if you wanted to. Another, less sacred name is used in its place, one that everybody knows is a less powerful substitute. God’s real name can be seen in any Torah, but it is never heard; anything you can call Him involves some kind of diminution. The prohibition against using God’s name has expanded to the point where the stand-ins have acquired a taboo quality of their own, as have even some of the substitutes for the substitutes. You’ll say adonai when praying, but adoshem or Ha-Shem (literally, The Name) when merely making reference to God. You’ll say elohim in prayer, but otherwise it’s elokim: what would look like blasphemy anywhere else—imagine calling Jesus, Mesus—is a sign of respect among Jews.

  Although Yiddish has more than its share of euphemism and antiphrasis—calling a fat person Tiny or an evil eye a good eye—the only things or beings whose names are programmatically excluded from a child’s universe are God and the kid’s own penis. No living being, young or old, knows what God is really called, and no little boy knows the real name of his shtekl or shmekl. All he knows about it is that his penis is no shtekele, no candy cane, and that it is the only part of his body that doesn’t seem to have a name of its own. Shmekl thus expresses an attitude to shtekl, a name that the child quickly learns has nothing to do with the part of him to which it’s supposed to refer. An arm is an arm; a leg, a leg; even his tukhes, or rear end, has a name that it doesn’t have to share. Only his penis is referred to obliquely, metaphorically, by a name that really belongs to something else. Any pre-Hebrew school pisher already knows that his member is a “shtekele,” not a shtekele, and he therefore uses the term only in its irreverent, slightly contemptuous shm-form—shmekele—lest anyone think that he can’t tell metaphor from reality. The parallel to the Tetragrammaton turns on his using a deformed version of a name that has been substituted for the real name that he doesn’t know—and knows that he doesn’t know.

  Because of the difficulty of invoking the deity in such cultural circumstances, Yiddish cursing tends to shy away from blasphemy; it isn’t easy to say “God damn” when saying “God” is so hard, and Yiddish—although it might occasionally call on God—has virtually no casually blasphemous expressions of the “Jesus Christ!” type that are so common in English. What makes shmuck so powerful and dirty and offensive is the fact that its role as the sine qua non of the ritual that defines the whole religion, as virtually the only aspect of creation that the language treats in the same way as it treats the Creator, allows it to stand in for all those blasphemies that are literally unspeakable in traditional Jewish life. The surface vulgarity is recognized, even if only subconsciously, as a mask for something much more serious.

  III

  Shmuck, THE FORM under which shmok has come into English, is a dialect pronunciation of the Yiddish. It has nothing to do with the German Schmuck, “jewelry,” which is often erroneously thought of as the source of the Yiddish term. The shmuck that we’re talking about can be found in shmok form as early as 1697, when it appears in the manuscript of a satirical Purim play from Altendorf, Germany. In a double entendre-filled passage that begins, “I’d really like to have a lick [instead of “a look”] at that,” and ends with “lek mikh in arsh lokh, lick my asshole,” Mordechai says, “I think that my wife’s hole—I meant to say the door’s hole—is too narrow” and then goes on to say that his sash or belt is “too shmok, shmok, I mean shmol” shmol is Yiddish for narrow or tight-fitting. The proximity of the hole to the shmuck leaves no doubt as to the meaning of the word, and lets us know how well established the usage must have been: dirty jokes that need footnotes tend not to get told.

  The leap from shmok-as-penis to shmok-as-fool in Yiddish is no greater than that from tool-as-penis to tool-as-fool in English. It’s the idea of thinking with your dick, letting your hormones drive your hippocampus, not when you’re looking for sex, but when you’re doing your taxes or driving a car; your behavior is brainless, inappropriate, and sometimes offensive. As Max Weinreich says in his History of the Yiddish Language, the two-legged shmok is a “combination of fool, gullible person, and nudnik,” a person of no intelligence and no discernment who behaves in a bothersome and annoying fashion.

  But Weinreich, still the doyen of the academic study of Yiddish nearly forty years after his death, mentions shmok only in passing (while pointing out that none of the common Middle High German terms for penis ever made its way into Yiddish), and stops short of the whole ugly truth. Like real-life shmek that come both with and without a foreskin, the metaphorical ones can also be divided into two broad categories, only the first of which can include oneself or one’s friends. It’s the kind of shmuck that anybody who isn’t always a shmuck has probably been at one time or another: “So there I am in my wedding gown, standing there like a shmuck at the top of the Empire State Building, when his lawyer gets out of the elevator and tells me that the wedding is off.”

  This is the passive shmuck, the shmuck as fool or dupe: harmless but hapless, eternal victim of petty circumstance and the wiles of others, to whom shit never ceases to happen. It’s the shmuck that is, rather than the shmuck that does; no matter what he might think he’s doing, the truth is that it’s being done to him. It’s the kind of shmuck who buys stock from a cold call or signs up for seminar after boot camp after workshop about how to realize your inner potential; it’s the smart woman who makes stupid choices, thinking that this year’s bad boy or married man is going to be different from last year’s. It’s everyone who took out a mortgage that they knew they couldn’t afford, everybody who didn’t do enough figuring to find out what all that free money could end up costing. It’s all of us at that critical second when hope or desire so overrides the most basic common sense, when something—money, reputation, peace of mind—seems so close to being attainable that we ignore anything that we have learned from experience and open ourselves up to a good plucking—physical, financial, or emotional. And always for the sake of the last thing we really need.

  It isn’t always our fault. Anyone with emotions is vulnerable to this kind of shmuckery, and there are times when it can’t be avoided. When somebody has lied about honoring a contract or not committing adultery or meeting you at the top of the Empire State Building to get married, you’ve simply been taken advantage of by a shmuck who isn’t playing by the rules. Being duped or deceived in this way doesn’t necessarily reflect on you, unless you already know how the person in question has treated others in the past and think that this time is going to be different.

  It’s like Charlie Brown letting Lucy hold the football for a placekick. Even after she’s given him a written guarantee promising not to do so, Lucy inevitably pulls the ball away at the last second and poor Charlie Brown ends up flat on his back. Yiddish-speaking readers give out with a mental sigh and a pitying murmur: “The poor little shmuck.”

  We’re close to the origins of comedy here, maybe even the origins of humor itself. We already know what Charlie Brown can’t bring himself to admit, and can laugh about it only because the emotions invested in trying to kick that ball are his, not ours: if he didn’t really care about kicking the ball, none of this would be happening. Once it comes to our own lives, though, we are all the dupes of desire, and the idea that people and circumstances that are similar or even identical to those that we have experienced before are going to be different this time is a testament to the human capacity for self-delusion, a deliberate, active naïveté that is just another form of folly.

  The Talmud talks about such feelings in a context that might seem a bit unusual:

  Whoever has money and lends it
without witnesses violates the prohibition against placing a stumbling block before the blind [see Lev. 19:14]. Resh Lakish says: He brings a curse upon himself.

  (BOVO METSIYO 75B)

  “The blind” here means you, the lender. In its immediate Talmudic environment it means that you’re so carried away by the thought of all the interest that you’re going to earn that you neglect to take the basic precautions to make sure that you get paid. In a larger sense, you’re so blinded by the thought of getting what you want—generally for very little effort—that you ignore everything else and “just do it,” and end up with egg all over your face.

  Resh Lakish’s statement about the curse refers to the inevitable lawsuit and the fact that the person to whom you’ve lent the money will deny ever having borrowed it. In the absence of properly witnessed documentation, you’ll be able to kiss the money you loaned, along with the money that you spend on legal fees and any reputation for competence that you might have had, good-bye.

  Note that self-shmuckification of this kind is described as a violation of divine law. We’re dealing with a system in which stupidity has become a sin, and like all sins it can be avoided. All we have to do in the case just outlined is to follow the advice that we’d give anyone else by trying to run our lives on the basis of a little seykhl, a little rational thought, rather than pure emotion. This might not be easy, but it’s nothing—a moral and emotional picnic—compared with the kind of shmuckish passivity that so robs its victims of any insight or willpower that they can no longer recognize their own situation, let alone do anything to improve it.