We had a recent thread asking about the “objection shmobjection” and it had a link at a rather complete Staff Report on the topic. All in English, of course.
What about other languages? I had many Jewish friends in Venezuela and although they used “Shmo” a lot, I don’t think they used the “something shmomething” bit.
Is this an exclusively English thing?
It’s also used in Israeli Hebrew, obviously, most famously by David Ben-Gurion in response to some U.N. resolution: “U.N., ShmU.N.”*
*Originally: “Oom, Shmoom.”
It’s also used in Russian. For example, photo-shmoto = фото-шмото.
Is that really Hebrew? It sounds to these Irish Catholic ears more like Yiddish. Possibly Russian.
In Norwegian… not so much except as a result of influence from English speaking media. It doesn’t really fit in Norwegian, so you’re more likely to use our equivalent.
Directly translated example:
Physics? Physics me here and physics me there.
It is used in Hindi. The interesting thing is it changes depending on the word, bust mostly it’s a “sh” or a “w” e.g.:
kachra wachra (garbage)
chair shair (chair)
paani wani (water)
ticket shicket (ticket)
It applies to only some words, but each word has it’s own “anti-word”. And it doesn’t necessarily indicate a “dissing”. For example, only “kachra wachra” is “dissing” someone/something as garbage, while the others are like an “all inclusive” as in “ticket shicket liya kya?” meaning “have you taken your ticket and everything else you need for your travel?”
Seeing as Ben-Gurion was originally a Yiddish-speaking Russian, that’s not surprising.
Modern Hebrew is a bit of a sponge, with many of its colloquialisms lifted from other tongues. The most common sources are Arabic, English and Yiddish.
This is very curious. Does this come from the Yiddish usage also?
Thank you, I was going to mention this as my mother and several other aunts and other family members in India do this as well, but I didn’t know how to properly elucidate the sounds or what it is they do. But yeah, my mom and dad have been doing this since I was young, and as they get older they tend to cross over into doing it to english words, just as you described!
And to the person who wonders if it’s in Yiddish usage- I’m not really sure, as it’s a prevalent thing in India, and I don’t know how big the spread of Yiddish would be to India in the old days (as this is something more prevalent for me as being done by elderly Indian speakers and less so by younger speakers growing up).
So I can say it’s probably something that’s been derived on it’s own in the Indian language, and not a recent thing that’s popped up thanks to the spread of Yiddish users doing it.