How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck) by Wex, Michael (summer reading list txt) 📕

MR. COHEN: Hello, Mr. Levy. How’s your wife these days?

MR. LEVY:Freg nisht, don’t ask. She was just diagnosed with cancer.

MR. COHEN: Cancer, shmancer, abi gezunt, as long as she’s healthy.

This surprisingly popular old joke is still circulating in many versions, all of which turn on the reaction of Cohen, a know-it-all who isn’t really listening and doesn’t really care about the welfare of Levy’s wife. He is so quick to throw in a shm in order to cut Levy’s troubles down to their proper size—smaller than Cohen’s, no matter how big they might look to Levy—so quick to come out with the standard kvetch-squelcher abi gezunt, “as long as you’re healthy,” that he misses the all too painful fact that this time it’s something serious.

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