Schmuck spreader – Frank McNally on the unholy resonance of an old Christian hymn

Among this week’s minor musical milestones, I see, is the 300th anniversary of a premiere involving Johann Sebastian Bach’s setting of the old Lutheran hymn: Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele.
I only noticed this, to be honest, because it sounds very rude in English. But in German, of course, it’s not.
On the contrary, the hymn’s lyrics compare the unity between Jesus and a Christian receiving communion with that of a bridegroom and his bride. The title translates as nothing more offensive than “Adorn thyself, my soul, with gladness.”
So where in this, I wondered, is the basis of the popular Yiddish term of abuse, schmuck? You know – the word that means variously “idiot”, “detestable fellow”, or “penis”? Well, apparently, etymologists don’t know either.
Expert opinion is divided as to whether the slang term comes from the Polish schmok (meaning “serpent” or “tail”), or the German schmucke, meaning “jewel” or “ornamentation” as in the hymn, but used sarcastically.
However derived, schmuck was once considered so offensive that people had to invent a politer alternative. Hence Schmo(e), which performs a similar role in American English as the Hiberno-English Feck does for a certain Anglo-Saxon swear word.
Like Hiberno-English, clearly, Yiddish is a language rich in insult. I recall somebody somewhere once suggesting that, in common with the supposed Eskimo vocabulary for snow, Yiddish must have at least 50 different words for “loser”.
From the same corner of the dictionary as schmuck, for example, comes schlep, schlub, schlemiel, and schlimazel.
To Irish ears, a schlep sounds like something you might get off a Kerry corner-back if you weren’t careful. In fact, it’s primarily a verb meaning to “pull” or “drag” (also popular tactics in Gaelic football).
And it was in that harmless sense the word was first introduced into English, by James Joyce no less, when in Ulysses he has Stephen Dedalus waxing poetical about a gypsy woman picking cockles on Sandymount Strand:
“Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun’s flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load.”
But yes, sure enough, there is also a related Yiddish noun describing underachievement: schlep being short for schlepper, on “an inept and stupid person”.
In schlimazel, we also have the origins of schemozzle, a word that has gone strangely native in Ireland, thanks to the GAA.
How this happened is very mysterious.
Based only on the fact that its popularity here seems to date from the early 1950s, and that the late Micheál O’Hehir is especially associated with it, I used to have a theory that it had been smuggled home in O’Hehir’s luggage after the 1947 All-Ireland Football Final in New York.
But Myles na gCopaleen of this newspaper was an early adopter in print (albeit he usually spelled it without a “c”) and he was no GAA fan. Besides which, I have also found it in a 1929 Evening Herald article about a court case from London’s Old Bailey, where it had been used in evidence to some puzzlement.
Asked to comment, a professor of Hebrew declared it “Jewish slang [from the] East End, where no many familiar slang words originate.”
He went on to explain that it was a corrupted portmanteau of the German schlim (meaning “slim”) and the Hebrew mazzal (“planet”). As combined in astrology, those added up to bad luck, or to “any situation in which unlucky fellows are involved”. Losers yet again.
Early Irish references include another court case, from Waterford in 1954. That involved a three-way collision outside the city’s hospital, involving a motorbike, a car, an ambulance.
Some flavour of the Munster Express’s report is conveyed it its subheadings, which include “Looked left and right”, “‘Terrific’ Application of Brakes”, and “[Drunk!] Is it codding me you are?”
The drivers involved all appeared to have been schlimazels in the ill-starred original sense of the term, and the incident was certainly a schemozzle in the later one.
But soon after that, the word began to appear in GAA coverage too.
After Cork’s shock defeat to Clare in a 1955 Munster Championship, for example, a match report suggested the losers had been fatally handicapped by the absence of a star defender, who was considered man of the match in absentia.
“One man, had he been playing, could have won the game… He was Jerry O’Riordan, whose sound defensive play would have been invaluable in the various schemozzles around the Cork goal.”
Perhaps O’Riordan had a talent for administering schleps, in the Kerry or Yiddish sense, or both.
In any case, circa 1955, the other sch-word was clearly in the process of putting down roots here. By the end of the decade, to borrow from a different James Joyce story, schemozzles were general, all over Ireland.