Move those hands closer together, buddy.
The Clinton campaign has accused Donald Trump of sexism after he told an audience in Michigan that Hillary “got schlonged” in the 2008 primary. “Schlong” is Yiddish slang for “penis.” As a New Yorker, Trump has surely heard the word before, probably while being ejected from a bar mitzvah. But I’ve never heard it used as a verb. Neither has benign speculator Steven Pinker, who suggested to the Washington Post that Trump became confused by the many Yiddish terms that begin with “sch-“. I would buy that excuse, except they all mean penis. For his part, the Golden Dome insists that “schlonged” means “badly defeated.” Agreed that many schlongs come to mean that for the men who possess them or, more often, for the men who insist on talking about them.
I encourage you to read the whole NYtimes article. It really gets interesting when it gets to the historical appreciation for semantics
“Perhaps the sting of “schlonged” is best explained by grammarians. As The Post’s Jenna Johnson noted, this is quite a memorable example of “turning a vulgar noun . . . into a verb” — something we all do when we use verbs like “trend” or “Google.”
“This conversion of nouns to verbs is known as ‘verbing’ and it has been around for as long as the English language itself,” Oxford University Press noted in 2013. “Ancient verbs such as rain and thunder and more recent conversions such as access, chair, debut, highlight and impact were all originally used only as nouns before they became verbs.”
Perhaps anticipating Trump’s use of “schlonged,” the Press also noted: “Verbing exists essentially to make what we say shorter and snappier. It can also give a more dynamic sense to ideas.”
One need not be a Trump detractor to condemn such usage. Benjamin Franklin, complaining about “awkward and abominable” nouns-as-verbs such as “notice,” “advocate” and “progress” in 1789, wrote a lexicographer: “If you should happen to be of my Opinion with respect to these Innovations you will use your Authority in reprobating them.”
If you’re a word nerd, I recommend Kory Stamper’s blog. Start with the first post. https://korystamper.wordpress.com/