The Long Yiddish Word (Schlong)

Lyrics

On the page, it begins with a digraph.
S-C-H.
Like the start of school or scholar.
The word is schlong.
From the Yiddish, shlang.
And before that, the German. Schlang.
A snake.

The word crossed the ocean around 1910.
In the mouths of peddlers and seamstresses.
It landed on Orchard Street, in the cold autumn air.
Smelled the sharp brine from the pickle barrels on the pushcarts.
A snake in a new garden.
A long word for a long thing, whispered over rye bread
in the garment factories, late afternoon.

A word is a snake, it sheds its skin.
It leaves the old world, a new one begins.
From the tenements to the theater lights,
it uncoils slowly through the New York nights.
Schlong. The journey from a foreign tongue
to a joke understood by everyone.

By 1925, it was on the vaudeville stage.
Written on a crumpled playbill, tucked away for its age.
The unnamed comedians, their names lost now,
made the English speakers laugh, and they weren't sure how.
A phonetic transfer in a cloud of cigar smoke.
The sound of creaking wooden seats when the punchline broke.
The snake learned a new language.

A word is a snake, it sheds its skin.
It leaves the old world, a new one begins.
From the tenements to the theater lights,
it uncoils slowly through the New York nights.
Schlong. The journey from a foreign tongue
to a joke understood by everyone.

Leo Rosten put it in his book in 1968.
The Joys of Yiddish.
He wrote: "Literally, a snake. Hence, penis."
And in 1966, a judge in a courtroom
declared the word harmless.
Just slang. Assimilated.
The snake was no longer venomous.
It had been tamed by the city.

I close the dictionary.
The page is yellow.
The word is sleeping now.
Coiled between schlemiel and schlep.
A long journey.
For a long word.