Shm-reduplication
Shm-reduplication is a form of reduplication in which the original word or its first syllable is repeated with the copy beginning with shm-, pronounced. The construction is generally used to indicate irony, sarcasm, derision, skepticism, or lack of interest with respect to comments about the discussed object. In general, the new combination is used as an interjection.
Examples
Using a noun
Shm-reduplication is often used with a noun:- "He's just a baby!"
"Baby-shmaby. He's already 5 years old!"
The second speaker is skeptical: they do not think the child is a baby or babyish.
- "What a sale!"
"Sale, schmale. I'm waiting for a larger discount."
The second speaker is showing lack of interest. They do not care about the sale.
- "Your son has an Oedipus complex."
"Oedipus, shmoedipus, as long as he loves his mother."
The second speaker is being sarcastic.Used as an adjective
- "Whenever we go to a fancy-schmancy restaurant, we feel like James Bond."
In this case, the shm-reduplication is used to intensify the meaning of "fancy", implying that it's really fancy.
Phonological properties
- Words beginning with a single consonant typically replace that consonant with shm-.
- Words beginning with a consonant cluster are more variable: some speakers replace only the first consonant if possible, others replace the entire cluster.
- Vowel-initial words prepend the shm- directly to the beginning of the reduplicant. Although this is conventionally accepted by English speakers as an addition of a new element to a whole word, from a strictly phonetic point of view this, too, is a replacement of the initial glottal stop by the shm- morpheme.
- Some speakers target the stressed syllable rather than the first syllable ; a subset of these do not copy base material preceding the stressed syllable.
- When speaking two words, usually the first word is shm-reduplicated. However, if the second word has more syllables than the first, the second word is often reduplicated instead.
- Shm-reduplication is generally avoided or altered with words that already begin with shm-; for instance, schmuck does not yield the expected *schmuck schmuck, but rather total avoidance or mutation of the shm-.
- Many speakers use sm- instead of shm- with words that contain a sh.
Origins and sociolinguistic distribution
The construction originated in Yiddish and was subsequently transferred to English, especially urban northeastern American English, by Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrations from Central and Eastern Europe. It is now known and used by many non-Jewish English speakers, particularly American English. The construction was also adopted in Modern Hebrew usage as a prefix resulting in a derogatory echoic expressive. For example, March 29, 1955 David Ben-Gurion dismissed a United Nations resolution as "Um-Shmum",.Ghil'ad Zuckermann wrote: "When an Israeli speaker would like to express his impatience with or disdain for philosophy, s/he can say filosófya-shmilosófya". In German Yiddish the same construction is possible, too, for example: Visum-Schmisum.
Zuckermann mentions in this context the Turkic initial m-segment conveying a sense of "and so on" as in the Turkish sentence dergi mergi okumuyor, literally "magazine 'shmagazine' read:NEGATIVE:PRESENT:3rd person singular", i.e. " doesn’t read magazines, journals or anything like that".
A similar phenomenon is present in most of the languages of the Balkan sprachbund, especially in colloquial Bulgarian where not only "sh-" and "m-", but also other consonants and consonant clusters are used in this way, and its usage has its particularities that differ from what the English 'shm' indicates.