Schleppen is also a valid German word, with pretty much the same meaning, but yes - when I lived in NYC, it was common to use the word (“Oh man, do I really have to schlep all the way up to 87th street just to get that book?”)
One quick story: Walking down the street in Berlin and hear a loud New Yorker (as if there are any other kinds) asking, “Anyone speak English?!” I went over, thinking she needed help finding her way to the subway or something. Instead, she is standing next to a quiet man (her husband) and then points to a huge sign on a business that says, “Schmuck”. Tell us what Schmuck means in German. I corrected her pronunciation, laughed (as I knew what they thought it meant) and told her it means “jewellery” in German. I can still hear her yelling, “I told you Maury, it didn’t mean that!”
Yup I know it, used it as a kid. I went to a Manchester school with a comparitively high Jewish intake, and my best friend is Jewish (no really, that’s true, despite the hideous way it sounds), and I learnt it from them.
Schwarze indeed can simply mean “black” (it’s related to the English word “swarthy”), but it’s not polite when used in such phrases as “the schwarze down the street”.
I’d type meshugenah if I had occasion to use the adjective, or meshuggener for the noun, but I’ve seen several variant spellings of both. It specifically connotes “crazy” more than “idiotic”, but the two concepts do overlap with great frequency.
Hmm. As an American, I can define over half the words on the wiki page, despite not knowing many Jewish people. However, I’ve never heard the word in the OP used to refer to people. Wiki says that it means " to drag or haul (an object); to make a tedious journey." I’ve only heard the first definition, as in “I can’t believe Jerry conned me into schlepping all this stuff to his dorm,” before now.
elfkin, that’s kinda odd, I often use it in the second sense, like, “I don’t want to schlep all the way over to a cafe with my computer and books, can’t we just study at school?”
Southern English living in Yorkshire. I knew schlep. I’d say quite a few words in the Wikipedia list are common in English English — like nosh, glitch and chutzpah. I was interested to see shemozzle, it was one of our family words (usually describing cat fights) that I’ve long suspected of being yiddish. My Nana worked as a Nanny for a couple of Jewish families in London so that may be where we got it from.
I know it and use it. It’s a great descriptor for an onerous carrying task. American non-Jewish in a slightly-more-Jewish-than-average area.
Schlep, kvetch, and zaftig are all words that need to make their way into the English lexicon in my mind. Schlep and zaftig have no good English equivalents.
I can think of only one person I know (and he’s not Jewish, though people have often taken him to be so) who uses it. He is a Cockney and the large numbers of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who flocked to the poorer quarters of London a century ago caused Yiddish words to be more widely recognised there than anywhere else. But he’s old-fashioned in a number of linguistic ways. He still uses ‘tart’ in its obsolete sense of ‘jam tart - sweetheart’; woman generally rather than ‘low-class woman, specifically prostitute’, and he still calls an umbrella a ‘gamp’ which I’ve never heard anyone else do.
And, now that I’m thinking correctly, I suggest that anyone who has even the slightest curiosity about Yiddish–go buy a copy of Leo Rosten’s Joy of Yiddish. You’ll be glad you did.
Interestingly, the Poms use a word, schtum (alternatively shtum, meaning silent and I’ve heard pronounced as schtoom) which I believe is Yiddish. I’ve never heard it used in the US and, while not unknown in Australia, rarely used.
I’ve not been able to find a link, but there was a bit in The New Yorker about Orthodox Jewish residents of an area of London wanting to erect a wire boundary, a eruv chatzerot to enable them to carry items on the Sabbath. Reform Jews disparaged it as a “magic schlepping zone”.
