The diminutive suffix -uchka makes clear that it’s meant affectionately, but do we really need a word like this? Once we’ve got over the frustration of a long train of ‘Yes, but whys’, we don’t really want to tell our children not to ask too many questions.
But the term doesn’t have to be applied only to children. It may not be a clever way to address a Russian policeman who is asking you for details of where you’ve been and whom you’ve seen, but assimilated into English it might be a very useful word to use to a local government official who won’t go away, or anyone in authority for whom it would be much less aggressive than a bad-tempered ‘Mind your own business.’ That patronizing -uchka at the end, the verbal equivalent of patting the person you are speaking to on the head, might also give a very pleasant feeling of superiority.
Schnorrer
(Yiddish)
Someone very skilled at getting others to pay out of a sense of duty
Make the mistake of getting out of a taxi without leaving a big enough tip and you may hear the taxi driver mutter under his breath, ‘Schnorrer!’ (SHNORR-uh). This, you will understand instinctively, is not a compliment.
Originally, the word was used by Jews about Jews, describing a dishonest beggar – a man, for example, who might dress as a gentleman, talk with all the pretensions of a scholar and treat his companion with expansive and condescending civility, but who would still ask for the loan of the price of a phone call. And then ask again. And again for something else.
Such a man would give elaborate and generally entirely imaginary reasons for asking for help – he might have been robbed, his house might have burned down, or he might find himself temporarily embarrassed at a moment when he needs to pay to get his car mended, settle an annoying bill, or offer assistance to a relative who has fallen on hard times. In any case, since both the schnorrer and generally his victim as well are Jewish, there is an overriding moral duty to help him. The more emotional and affecting the story, the better.
A particular kind of schnorrer, the literary schnorrer, might offer copies of a book he has written – always a literary masterpiece, in which he has selflessly invested years of hard and unrewarded work – in return for whatever gift of money the wealthy recipient thinks appropriate. And if the gift is not large enough, the schnorrer is likely to make it very clear that he is unimpressed.
Rather than sitting at the roadside asking for alms, the schnorrer engages with his target, giving the impression that he expects support as of right and is actually conferring a favour by offering the opportunity to give him money or goods. The frequent translation ‘beggar’ fails to reflect the impudence and presumption of the true schnorrer, whose shameless audacity is best summed up in another Yiddish word, chutzpah (HOOT-spa). Other words like ‘sponger’, ‘chiseller’ or ‘freeloader’ miss the all-important element of entitlement, while ‘con man’ or ‘confidence trickster’ do not include the sense of duty that the true schnorrer seeks to instil in his victim.
The English writer Israel Zangwill, working at the end of the nineteenth century, published a satirical novel named The King of Schnorrers, which tells the story of a Sephardic Jew, the grandly named Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa, who plays on his claims of scholarship, family background and royal connections to fleece a succession of more or less gullible victims. More ironically, the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, around the same time, said that the best-kept secret of his campaign was the work of ‘an army of schnorrers possessing a dream’ who hassled and persuaded and cajoled Jews across Europe to support his idea of a Jewish state.
Your taxi driver is probably not remembering these literary antecedents and probably not even thinking of the traditional characteristics of the Jewish schnorrer. He is simply using the best word available to describe a tightwad, a miser, a Scrooge and a skinflint, all rolled together and invested with all the contempt, mockery and derision that the Yiddish language can muster.
Or nearly all. If you don’t leave any tip, you may hear the word schnorrerdicke (SHNORR-uh-DICK-uh). That means the same, but much, much more so. Better by far to give him his tip in the first place – and make it a big one.
Handschuhschneeballwerfer & Sitzpinkler
(German)
A man who is a bit of a wimp
Few national stereotypes can be as undeserved as the reputation that the Germans have picked up for having no sense of humour. How can that possibly be true of a people who speak a language with words that are seventy-nine letters long? Their habit of creating a new compound word by the simple expedient of sticking together two, three, four or more old ones would seem logically to mean that German can translate any number of words in any language with just one of its own.
Practical stuff. But how could you use a word like Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbau-unterbeamtengesellschaft without sniggering? It means ‘The association for junior officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services’, and if any journalist were ever foolish enough to use it, it would run into three lines of a single column in a broadsheet newspaper – not that it crops up much in conversation. I suspect that, like its rather less impressive English equivalents antidisestablishmentarianism (opposition to a policy of taking away the Church of England’s special role in the state) or floccinaucinihilipilification (the act of valuing something as practically worthless), Donaudampfschiffahrt etc. is one of those words cobbled together simply to give schoolchildren something to laugh and marvel at.
So the German language’s capacity for making new compounds from old words results in more than just astonishing length. It also gives the language an enviable sense of fun. Take handschuhschneeballwerfer (hant-shoo-SHNAY-ball-vairf-uh) and sitzpinkler (SIT-spink-luh), for instance. Each of them arrives at pretty much the same meaning, although they take a different route to get there. And you probably wouldn’t want either of them to be applied to you.
A handschuh is, literally, a ‘hand-shoe’ – a glove. (If you couldn’t work that out for yourself, you haven’t got into the spirit of compound words.) Schnee is snow, so schneeball is pretty obvious; and the verb werfen is what you do to one. So a handschuhschneeballwerfer is a person who wears gloves to throw snowballs. That is not interpreted, as you might think, as someone who has at least an ounce of common sense but as someone who is scared to get his hands cold – hence, a bit of a wuss, a wimp or a softy.