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The word putzhead made headlines this past fall, when US senator Al D'Amato of New York used it to describe his Democratic challenger, Charles Schumer. There was a huge uproar of protest over the word, with Schumer's supporters claiming that D'Amato had called him the Yiddish equivalent of a dickhead. They were technically correct. Yiddish putz means both "penis" and "obnoxious person," and D'Amato's remark probably pushed the boundaries of polite political discourse. But D'Amato was also right when he responded that the word simply means "fool" or "jerk" in Yiddish. Of course, Al also lost the election; Charles is now Senator Putzhead, and whatever merits his defense may have had are now moot.

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The use of a word for penis to label an obnoxious person is also seen in the two senses of the English word dick. (For example, as in "Don't be a dick.") The Yiddish word putz "penis, obnoxious person," in turn, is related to the German word putz, which refers to some sort of ornament or trimming. The connection between the penis and an ornament is perhaps less straightforward, but we can easily imagine that one might metaphorically talk about a penis as a sort of decoration or trimming on the torso.

And though this may seem like an odd equation, putz is not the only word with such a history. Miss Poubelle was recently browsing through some German materials when she came across an advertisement for Schmuck-art. Since English schmuck usually means something like "obnoxious person," she imagined it to be art produced by a bunch of jerks. But on further reading, she found that the advertisement was only offering some rather expensive necklaces. Schmuck, as it turns out, is the ordinary German word for decoration or jewelry.

We've already seen that a word that means "ornament" or "trimming" in one language turns out to mean "penis" in another. Our English word schmuck is a Yiddish borrowing, and in Yiddish the word has two senses: "penis" and "jerk." An old joke makes this point pretty clearly....

An idiot was working at a circus. One day he got tired of putting up tents and cleaning up after elephants, so he decided to ride the camel into town for a bit of fun. He rode up the main street looking at all the stores and the pretty women, til he fell off the camel and the camel ran away. The police came up to him to take a report. "Was it a male camel or a female camel?" they asked. "I know it was a male," the idiot said, "because when I was riding down the street, all the people were yelling "Look at that schmuck on the camel!'"

While Yiddish schmuck has two meanings, it is the "jerk, obnoxious person" sense that is predominant in English. The change from the German word meaning "jewelry" to the Yiddish word meaning "penis" is like the metaphor seen the English phrase family jewels. Both the genitalia and jewelry are things treasured by their owners.

So both schmuck and putz have gone from fairly neutral words in German to words for penis in Yiddish. And from the meaning "penis," both words have gone on to also mean "jerk." And then English has borrowed the word with the primary sense of "jerk."

It's a funny fact of language that two separate words can undergo such parallel histories of borrowing and semantic change. Miss Poubelle can only conclude that in Yiddish, as in English, it is a very short step from having a dick to acting like one. **