The Schmear Factor, Explained

I took a look at my blog last night to fnd that part of my carefully crafted piece about global English had been cut out by Blogger. I guess there is some kind of word limit for individual blog posts, and I had exceded it.

Unfortunately, what was cut really was necessary to understand the point, so I will include it here:

For those of you who aren't from New York, in that fair city, the word schmear is often used to denote a small amount of cream cheese spread on a bagel. This usage is particularly entrenched among Upper West Side Jews (and I imagine Upper East Side Jews, but I never really knew anyone on that side of the park). Now, this strikes me as a strange word for English to pick up. Its utility is limited by two main factors:

1) It is used only of cream cheese. One doesn't request a schmear of butter, peanut butter, or anything else on one's bagel. The word tends to be used on its own, to mean only "a small amount of cream cheese" ("I'd like a pumpernickel bagel with a schmear, please") or to indicate that you want a small amount of cream cheese after having ordered your bagel ("Just a schmear").

2) The word doesn't collocate with other food products. Schmears are as firmly tied to bagels as lox.

Now, it is true that in New York English, schmear has at least a couple of other senses:

1) It can mean "everything" (as in, "give me the whole schmear," roughly meaning, "give me the whole Megilla" or "give me the whole kit and kaboodle"). In this sense, it's even less clear why New Yorkers feel a need to add schmear to our vocabulary. Everything will do just as well a lot of the time, and even when we want to be emphatic, we have a host of other idioms at our disposals already.

2) In the ever-so-honest world of New York real estate, a schmear refers to a quick patch-up job done on a house or apartment intended to hide deeper, underlying flaws--for instance, painting walls to hide extensive water damage. Here, the word may actually have greater real utility, but one can imagine patch-up and patch-over--the terms probably used by this for disreputable real estate agents elsewhere in America--being used by New Yorkers if schmear were not available.

Local versions of English, from what I've read, seem to abound in words like schmear, words that express local cultural phenomena (such as the enthusiastic consumption of bagels by New York Jews) that don't happen elsewhere. In some varities of English, the number of such words can run into the thousands. To give a sense of this, I would ask current or former New Yorkers to consider trying to explain to your cousin from Duluth such words as egg cream, alcove studio, express, medallion cab, or knish.

Added together, all of these multifarious colorful local words could have the potential to render local varities of English mutually unintelligible. This is what I call the schmear factor.