What a schmuck

Here's a little post that's more geared towards my interests and not my time in Germany. Presumably the sort of thing that will occur more often after this trip, so take that for what you will.

I was in class a few days back when I learned a fun new German word: schmuck. It means "jewelry." Immediately that little voice in my head spoke up.

"HEY! You know that word!"

"Well, yes, of course I do," I responded, not aloud. "It's a yiddish slang term."

"And you know what Yiddish is?"

"I should certainly hope so, because if you do and I don't then I'm going to start wearing tinfoil hats."

"Exactly! A Germanic language! As is German!"

"Hence the name." I could see where the voice was leading me. Schmuck, spelled the same (at least a good deal of the time) certainly doesn't mean 'jewelry' in Yiddish, heavens no. The Online Etymology Dictionary, one of my favorite sites, defines it as "contemptible person" in today's English, and I find no objection with that. It goes on to say that in Yiddish the exact meaning is of "penis," which I found a bit strange but not entirely out of the question, and that in term came from Old Polish smok for grass snake, or dragon. A bit of a funny semantic leap, if I don't say so myself.

So then are schmuck and schmuck related?

No, it turns out, not really at all. Despite coming from very closely related languages, the two terms are a simple coincidence.

The German schmuck is actually related to the English "smock" in that they both are originally from the Proto-Indo-European *smeugh-, "to press." Cognates across a few languages lead on to some other interesting trains of thought to follow another time. The PIE base's original notion was roughly one of "garment one creeps into" and there is an Old English cognate, smygel, meaning "burrow." Perhaps the linguist and writer J.R.R. Tolkien decided to make a little etymological link to one of his characters? As it turns out after a tiny bit of digging, yes. I independently discovered the source of his name that is well documented on Wikipedia.

So there you have it! Not only can a word in two closely related languages be spelled the same and yet have wildly differing meanings, they need not even be etymologically related! That and Tolkien seemed to have a thing for old Germanic languages.