Aug 252011
It’s always fun to learn a new word. Today’s word: the Irish/Yiddish “shemozzle.” Definition: a brawl. How it’s used:
Damn the torpedoes: Defence’s $600m blunder
The Defence Force’s long-delayed $600 million purchase of anti-submarine torpedoes has suffered another humiliating setback.
The Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) is now tendering for translators at a reported cost of around $110,000 after it was discovered the technical documentation for the European-designed weapons are written only in Italian and French.
The situation has been described as a “shemozzle” by a top defence strategist.
10 Responses to “Shemozzle”
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How is a $600 million blunder if it is only going to cost $110,000 to translate?
Yea, the article mentions other problems with the program, but the article is focused on the need to translate the manuals. Weird that the manufacturer didn’t assume that Australia would need English translations, though.
> How is a $600 million blunder if it is only going to cost $110,000 to translate?
JOURNALISMIZATIONIZING!!!
Still, I gather the whole procurement has been a mess. You’d think Oz would be able to develop their *own* torpedoes for that sum.
“shemozzle” reminds me of the beggining song of the old sitcom “Lavirne & Shirley”.
Sounds like it, but not quite.
schlemazel
“born loser,” 1948, from Yiddish shlim mazel “rotten luck,” from M.H.G. slim “crooked” + Heb. mazzal “luck.” British slang shemozzle “an unhappy plight” (1889) is probably from the same source.
I love Yiddish; you can have a pretty fair idea what the word means by how it sounds without translation. That’s a damn near perfect language. 😀
I’m Irish-American, and I’ve never heard the term before.
Operators manuals in French and Italian?
Wait till they get to the part of the manual about how to disarm them when you surrender.
Ye gods!
He, good one!
Okay, I got curious:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Yiddish_origin
Apparently it’s of Yiddish origin, but got incorporated into Irish, because it sounded good.
“shemozzle (slang) quarrel, brawl (perhaps related to schlimazel, q.v.) (OED). This word is commonly used in Ireland to describe confused situations during the Irish sport of hurling, e.g. ‘There was a shemozzle near the goalmouth’. In particular, it was a favourite phrase of t.v. commentator Miceal O’Hehir who commentated on hurling from the 1940s to the 1980s.”
It does _sound_ Irish though, particularly the “she” part that shows up in the pronunciation of a lot of Gaelic words.
I found this article to be interesting
http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2011-05/twilight-uperfluous-carrier
I don’t know if anything will ever come out of supercavitating rocket torpedoes (HTP is enough to blow the nose off a sub as we all know), but if cruise missile ever get any larger, a threat nation might want to have the missile have a torpedo itself as a package to drop into the water as the cruise missile gets within range of a carrier groups defenses.
That might actually be when the old F-14 Tomcat might be missed, to fly quickly out to target, then slow down above the water out ahead of a weapon and drop a counter-munition slowly enough that it doesn’t break in pieces as it hits the waterline…