Schlep

[Dr. Goodword]

• schlep •

Pronunciation: shlep • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Verb, Noun

Meaning: 1. [Verb] To drag, haul, carry something (possibly yourself) with difficulty or unwillingly. 2. [Noun] An exhausting journey or job. 3. [Noun, offensive] A jerk, a ninny.

Notes: The C between S and H is more in keeping with the German origins of today's Good Word (see Word History), but no one will criticize you if you spell it shlep. (Tell me if they do.) Do remember that this is a verb ending on a consonant preceded by an accented (stressed) vowel. The final consonant on this type of verb doubles when you add an ending beginning with a vowel: schleps, but schlepped, schlepping, schlepper (someone who scihleps).

In Play: Today's word is used most often in the first sense above but here is a little story illustrating all three meanings: "Not only did I have to schlep up and down the stairs all day, I had to schlep the old furniture out and the new furniture into the house. I felt like such a schlep doing it all by myself. That was a huge schlep for one person!"

Word History: Today's Good Word, as I'm sure you are already aware, was another gift with smiles from Yiddish. Yiddish is a language based on German but substantially influenced by Hebrew and Slavic languages, especially Russian and Polish. English simply dropped the infinitive ending from Yiddish shlepn "to drag, pull", which Yiddish got from German schleppen "to pull, drag". German inherited the root of this word from Proto-Indo-European slei- "slime, slippery" with a P suffix. The same combination ended up in English as slip and as slime with an M suffix. Since things slip along when they are dragged, we can see that the change in meaning is a natural one. (It is no schlep at all to offer our gratitude to Mary Jane Stoneburg, one of the Good Word editors.)

[George Kovac]

An indispensable resource for Yiddish words used in American English is Leo Rosten’s “Joys of Yiddish,” first published in 1968. The title of this niche dictionary was a play on the name of the ever popular “Joy of Cooking,” which spawned other jokey titles in the 1960s like the infamous best seller the “Joy of Sex.”

Rosten’s book is a mix of shticky humor and valuable lexigraphical insights. His unique pronunciation guides are easier to master and often more accurate than those of more serious dictionaries. I note that Rosten lists “shlep” as the preferred spelling of today’s good word, with only a cross reference in the entry for “schlep.”

The enduring appeal of Rosten’s dictionary lies in his stories and examples of usage. Sometimes they are borscht-belt set piece humor, but he also reaches to the Torah, Shakespeare, and serious academic tomes, as well as contemporary advertising and journalism for his examples, to demonstrate how Yiddish can deftly enrich the English language, sometimes to leaven, and sometimes to deflate what would otherwise be dull prose.

For “shlep,” Rosten cites this usage, which appeared in the New York Post on September 29, 1957:

“Queen Elizabeth will shlep along 95 pieces of baggage on her trip here.”

[misterdoe]

Hard to mentally associate royalty with schlepping. Queen Elizabeth has people for that, of course.

(I just remembered John Goodman as King Ralph.. I'm sure he schlepped. )