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shlumpadinka?

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March 14, 2008, 11:49
pearce
shlumpadinka?
Here's a word I had not heard of, and couldn't find in WC archives. It could come in handy when you really want to be popular with the girls.
shlumpadinka : a woman who dresses like she has completely given up on herself and it shows : a dowdy and unstylish woman

"There you are running out to get the paper looking like a shlumpadinka." —Oprah Winfrey (April 27, 2007)

"I have to practice not looking like a shlumpadinka on the air," said Oprah Winfrey on her eponymous show, broadcast April 15, 1997. Oprah has occasionally separated shlumpa and dinka, the constituent parts of the word, for emphasis: "You are watching right now in your sweats...the same sweats you had on yesterday and the day before...you are a shlumpa and a dinka and you know it!" Oprah has also used the word shlumpadink to refer to a masculine subject, although this form is somewhat less frequently heard. Oprah has often used shlumpadinka attributively to modify another noun, as in "It's my shlumpadinka shoes!" or "You're watching me right now in your shlumpadinka pajamas."

Merriam-Webster's editors believe that the word is influenced by schlump, a word of Yiddish origin meaning "a sloppy or dowdy person."
March 14, 2008, 12:01
tsuwm
quote:
shlumpadinka


Oprah may claim some proprietary rights to this, but see shlumperdik
March 14, 2008, 13:18
shufitz
Loved this title in your link, tsuwn:P.S. How in the blue blazes did you ever find shlumperdik?
March 14, 2008, 16:08
tsuwm
I had something like that in my junk drawer memory -- it wasn't too hard to find, starting from shlump/schlump.

edit: here

as usual with Yiddish terms, transliteration is variable (this sounds like a cyborg pronouncement to my ear).

This message has been edited. Last edited by: tsuwm,
March 14, 2008, 16:28
zmježd
shlumperdik

Yiddish שלומפער (shlumper) 'draggle-tail' (in Harkavy), שלומפערל (shlumperl) 'Cinderella', שלומפערדיק (shlumperdik) 'dowdy' (in Weinreich). I had never run across draggle-tail, but the 1913 Webster's offers "[a] slattern who suffers her gown to trail in the mire; a drabble-tail".

The late Eli Katz ז״ל, professor of linguistics and Yiddish, used to kvetsh about folks using shmir as a noun instead of a verb.


Ceci n'est pas un seing.
March 15, 2008, 00:25
pearce
quote:

Oprah may claim some proprietary rights to this, but see shlumperdik


Oprah's originality has been seriously challenged. See [URL= http://www.oprah.com/community/message/142554]here[/URL]


And the word has, as you say, probably derived from Schlumperdik, meaning dowdy.