September 10, 2001

schmaltz

I am curious about schmaltz, which is used to describe anything that is overly sentimental, often to the point of being nauseating. All the dictionaries that I consulted state that a strict translation of this Yiddish word is 'greasy, melted fat'. If that is the case, it seems more logical to me that this word would be a synonym for unctuous. How did it acquire its current meaning? Can you also comment on how this and other Yiddish words such as schmooze, klutz, etc. entered American slang? I heard a story that attributes this to...many of the actors and actresses who became stars in Vaudeville, who had their start in the Yiddish theatre in New York City.

Schmaltz, even when freshly prepared, is not for the faint of stomach. It is rendered goose fat, clarified and cooled, then spread thickly on dark bread and salted--and sometimes topped with fetid-smelling cheese for good measure. My aunt cooks down the fat with onions and apples for more flavor, and folks of her generation will actually eat it deliberately. I still maintain it's a holdover from making a virtue out of a necessity: most humans thankfully no longer need to acquire a taste for substances that would work better as industrial lubricants.

The word schmaltz is a German word that survived without alteration in Yiddish. For the Yiddish connection, I turned to Sol Steinmetz, retired editorial director here at Random House Reference, and the author of Yiddish and English: The Story of Yiddish in America (second edition just published in 2001). Here's what he had to say:

The figurative use of schmaltz ('mawkishness, oversentimentality') and its derivative, schmaltzy, is not found in Yiddish but is rather an American English innovation on the Yiddish loanword. The parallel to this innovation is the word goo and its derivative gooey: both goo and schmaltz are thick, sticky, oily substances, and figuratively both mean 'maudlin or mawkish sentimentality'. Semantically, both words compare something (music, writings, etc.) dripping with thick sentimentality to the drippings of a fatty or greasy substance.

As for Janet's second question, about how Yiddish words entered American slang, the Vaudeville story is true to some extent, but that alone can't explain the continuous and widespread use of Yiddish loanwords long past the 1920s to the present.

For more about Yiddish loanwords, check out Chapter 5 of Sol's book.

Wendalyn