Schmoozer? Did someone call him schmoozer? A younger Gerard E. Evans wasn't certain what the guy meant, being somewhat new to Annapolis and unacquainted with the lingo. Sure enough, he says some politico looked at him and used the word, and that moment 10 years ago was the first time he'd heard it.
"I took it as a term of kind of endearment," says Mr. Evans, 40, a gregarious man who today ranks as Maryland's highest-paid lobbyist.
Schmoozer, a noun; one who schmoozes, a verb. This is a good thing, right? Perhaps.
The legislative session is here, and so it begins. The marble corridors of the State House and the bar at Fran O'Brien's and the snug booths in the Little Campus lounge will resound again with the talk of lobbyists, legislators, staff members and policy specialists. Some of this jabber will qualify as "schmoozing," which, as it has come to be understood in American speech, may or may not be a wholesome activity. Alas, an otherwise nice word has stumbled into the political and corporate worlds and turned rather sleazy.
"I think it would mean someone who would chit-chat with you, or kibitz," says Mr. Evans. "That's the extent of my Irish-Catholic understanding of schmooze."
Which is fine, as far as the original meaning goes.
The Yiddish word "shmues" means a conversation, derived from the Hebrew "shmuos," for rumors, or "things heard." In "The Joys of Yiddish," Leo Rosten defines schmooze as "a friendly, gossipy, prolonged, heart-to-heart talk."
Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter, a professor of Yiddish at Columbia University, says "It's not a brief, two-sentence conversation but a relaxed, half-hour or hour conversation."
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word appeared in the New York Times Magazine as early as 1897.
Articles in the journal American Speech, the New Yorker and Life magazines from the 1920s, '30s and '40s, respectively, use the term in its more innocent meaning of socializing or gossiping. The Life article of November 1948, profiling a trio of brothers who produced low-budget movies, comes closest to the more unsavory sense of the term in its description of kid brother Hymie King: "A friend describes him as 'the schmoozer, the contact guy. You walk into their office and in four minutes Hymie's got his arm around your shoulder and he's giving you a good tip in the seventh at Hollywood Park.' "
