words wholly unrelated

schmuck (the the german word for jewel) & schmuck (the yiddish word for <ahem> dick)

what the smucker family fruit spread cartel doesn’t want you to know is that they were originally schmuckers, a long line of swiss jewelers. once they infiltrated america, they changed their name because if its connotations with—in a twist worthy of the one good m. night shyamalan movie—smoking. the fact that schmuck was also the yiddish word for the naughty male member has only recently bubbled to the surface with their current motto “with a name like smucker’s, it has to be good.”

i just assumed (and i swear i read somewhere)—since yiddish is a germanic language, and all of us have, from time to time, referred to our nuts as our sparkling jewels—that these two words were related. “not so fast,” says this atlantic monthly article if atlantic monthly articles could speak.

according to the lexicographer Michael Wex, a top-tier Yiddishist…the Yiddish and German schmucks are completely unrelated.

“Basically, the Yiddish word comes out of baby talk,” Wex said. “A little boy’s penis is a shtekl, a ‘little stick.’ Shtekl became shmeckle, in a kind of baby-rhyming thing, and shmeckle became shmuck. 

it seems like a stretch to me BUT michael wex is a top-tier yiddishist, and i am only a third tier yiddishist, so i will go with what he says for now.

__

un grand merci to mrs. p. b. legault who brought this important matter to my attention all the way from her home in the southwest of france.