>>>>>It's amazing the amount of Yiddish we, even in England, speak regularly: "it's a bit of a schlepp", "he's a schmo/schlemeil", et al (forgive spelling). I love it. Many a put-down expression.
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>>>>Its schlemiel and schlemazel. The first one is the waiter that drops the soup on the customer's lap. The second one is the dropee.
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>>>I looked up schlemiel and schmo this morning in the dictionary. They're both listed and both mean more or less the same: Schmuck :-)
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>>I have the feeling that my Yiddish isn't nearly as good as Alex or Tamar, but the connotations behind those words are very different.
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>>I can't think of a good english word for "schlemiel" or "schlemazel" (or "schmo" for that matter) but I think "schmuck" translates very well to "prick" in both literal and figurative senses. While the other three words all have negative implication, none of them are nearly as strong.
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>I missed the whole story, since I don't read long threads <g>

Boy, have you come to the wrong place <lol>.

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>Ok, just to suggest something: Read Isaac Bashevis-Singer (?) story "Mazel and Shlimazel". It's a children's story.

Now there was a master of the short story. I read his collected stories some years ago and enjoyed them immensely. Almost no similarity to my own circumstances, but I like my fiction that way. Similar examples are Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri, who focus on Chinese mothers and daughters and Indian-American immigrant familes, respectively. What do I know about those things? Probably about as much as I have learned from their novels. Which is my point. I not only enjoy their books for the same reasons any good works of fiction are enjoyable, I feel like I've learned something.