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

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 arshlokh, 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