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Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task. Interesting lingu
by shortlived 14y ago
Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed
into general use in the US. It means a tedious,
unpleasant task.
Interesting linguistic tangent. I'm curious where you encountered schlep as a noun. My experience and various dictionaries define it as a verb ("to schlep"). E.g. "Oy vey. Do we really have to schlep over at this hour?"
Maybe it was just artistic license.
- donaldc 14y agoThere's a natural tendency in English to use as nouns words that were originally verbs. Examples: I'm going for a walk. I'm having a talk with someone. Dictionary definition or not, a google search for the phrase "a schlep" returns >60,000 results.
- mjn 14y agoIf the (recently added) part-of-speech tagging on Google Books is accurate, the chronology is the other way around: it used to be equally used as a noun and verb, but sometime in the 1990s the verb form became dominant: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=schlep_VERB%2Cschlep_NOUN&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share= http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=schlep_VERB%2Cs...
- dockd 14y agoA "gerund" is a noun that has "ing" added to it and is used as a verb.
- lepton 14y agoThe other way around. From Wikipedia: As applied to English, it refers to the use of a verb (in its -ing form) as a noun (for example, the verb "learning" in the sentence "Learning is an easy process for some").
- sbisker 14y agoYou clearly haven't hung out with my grandmother. Schlep can definitely be used as a noun, and commonly is by native Yiddish speakers. (As in "Oy! What a shlep!" or "Picking you up during rush hour would be a shlep, how about you just take the bus?")