Just how much did Ben Zimmer chuckle while writing this "schlong" analysis for Politico? Well, no matter how much he was laughing, he did manage to write in a serious tone on the subject...which made it come off even funnier than was probably intended. At first Zimmer slams Donald Trump for his use of the term "schlonged" but ends up exonerating him when other examples of the slang word being used as a synonym for "defeat" were found.
Speaking in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Monday, Trump assailed Hillary Clinton for losing the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama in 2008. “She was favored to win and she got schlonged,” he said.
To describe Clinton’s loss to Obama in the primaries, Trump chose a slangy verb derived from “schlong,” a Yiddish word for “penis,” in turn from German “schlange,” meaning “snake.” It’s a word that he seems to enjoy, as he used it in a 2011 interview to describe another electoral defeat. When Jane Corwin, the Republican candidate for a House seat in New York, lost to Kathy Hochul in a special election, that, too, was “getting schlonged” in Trump-speak.
Slang dictionaries only record “schlong” as a noun, not a verb, so is “getting schlonged” simply a peculiarity of Trump’s loose-lipped lexicon? Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker suggested as much in an interview with the Washington Post, surmising that “schlong” as a verb was a misappropriation of Yiddish: Trump may have “reached for what he thought was a Yinglish word for ‘beat’ and inadvertently coined an obscene one,” Pinker said.
Yeah, it is written in stone that "schlong" can only be used as a noun. As for Trump somehow incorrectly using it as a synonym for "beat," Zimmer quickly exonerates him on that score since similar examples of that usage were found:
While the expression is rare, it has in fact shown up in earlier political contexts, typically from New Yorkers like Trump. The Post notes that Neal Conan, host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation, said in a 2011 broadcast that the 1984 Democratic ticket of Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro “went on to get schlonged at the polls.” And on Fox News in 2006, Dick Morris warned that President George W. Bush was “going to get schlonged” in the midterm elections.
Listen to Neal Conan's peculiar NPRish pronunciation of "schlonged."
Apparently Trump's use of "schlonged" to mean "beat" or defeat" was also used almost 50 years ago:
Long before that, the phrase made an appearance in New York City collegiate politics. The Daily Mail uncovered a 1967 article in the student newspaper of the City College of New York in which Ellen Turkish, a candidate on the losing slate for student council, said, “We got schlonged.” (As Ellen T. Comisso, she would go on to a distinguished career as a political scientist.)
Finally a hopeful note from Zimmer of what he hopes will be Trump's fate...ironically also again validating his usage of "schlonged":
Will Trump suffer any long-term political fallout over “schlong-gate”? His polling numbers do not seem affected even by his most outrageous statements, so his latest choice of words likely won’t matter, at least in the short term. But over time, his vulgarisms may paint him as rhetorically unpresidential, and he could be the one getting schlonged in the polls.
And is it true that Politico got badly schlonged by its former lethargic labor reporter, Mike Elk? A report has circulated that he has been bragging that he schlonged Politico to the tune of $40,000 on his way out their exit door after months of performing no work.
