Schlonged?

Having been involved in my previous two columns with the love of neighbors, I had no chance until now to participate in the great controversy over Donald Trump’s Yiddish. Perhaps this is just as well, because now that the furor has abated over what exactly Trump said, meant to say, thought he had said, or should be blamed or not blamed for saying when he remarked on December 21 that Hillary Clinton was “schlonged” in her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama, it is possible to make a few summarizing observations.

The first of these is that Trump was almost certainly not guilty of the deliberate sexual innuendo that he was widely accused of making. Although all of his detractors knew that “schlong” was a slang term, originating with American Jews, for a penis, few were aware that, used as a verb, it had the additional meaning, especially in Trump’s native New York City, of to beat someone soundly in an athletic contest. As pointed out by the Forward‘s veteran columnist J.J. Goldberg, hardly a Trump enthusiast:

“Schlonged” isn’t just “schlong” plus “-ed.” I grew up in Long Island in the 1950s and 60s, not far from Trump’s Queens neighborhood and around the same time. Where we lived, “schlonged” was an utterly commonplace term meaning “clobbered” or “thoroughly defeated.” It gained particular currency after the New York Mets set up shop [and] had nothing to do with male anatomy, at least not in the mind of anyone I knew.