Chances are likely you’ve never heard of the term “ablaut reduplication.” It was new to me as well when a friend emailed a hard-to-read screenshot of a brief newspaper clipping. Being a word person, ...

English shmenglish. Language shmanguage. The practice of copying a word and sticking a shm- onto it came into the U.S. with Yiddish speakers in the late 19th century, and by the 1930s it had spread ...