Etymon #36
Shame about nerve
The word entered English in the mid-nineteenth century, borrowed from Yiddish. Its earliest recorded use in English appears on a poster from 1853. By 1886 it had appeared in The American Hebrew, a weekly English-language Jewish newspaper published in New York. It arrived with the Jewish immigrant communities who brought their language, humour, and vocabulary to America. The Yiddish source carried a meaning that was entirely negative.
Its journey into English began long before it was used in America. The Yiddish source drew on Hebrew, and behind the Hebrew lay Aramaic, the common language of the ancient Near East, spoken from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean. The Aramaic root named the act of being insolent or impudent. The word moved from Aramaic into Hebrew, then into Yiddish, and arrived in English with the Jewish immigrant communities of America in the late nineteenth century.
The Aramaic root meant to be barefaced. When a person did something wrong, shame was the expected response, visible on the face as an acknowledgement of having crossed a line. This word named the person who showed none.
SCHLEP and SCHMOOZE share the same source language. SCHLEP came from Yiddish shlepn, the labour of dragging or hauling something heavy. SCHMOOZE came from Yiddish shmuesn, originally a warm friendly conversation, though in English it acquired the sharper sense of talking with an ulterior motive. This word came from the same source language and moment in history.
In American English the word's meaning started to change across the middle decades of the twentieth century. What had been purely negative became something more ambivalent, even admiring. Leo Rosten, in The Joys of Yiddish in 1968, captured it mid-shift, defining it as displaying incredible guts, presumption and arrogance. By the end of the twentieth century the change was complete. In 2025 the Hollywood Reporter described Timothée Chalamet's character in Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme as angling his off-the-charts version of it into his ticket out of a mundane life.
Eight letters.
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