New Yorkese

Whenever I visit New York, I stay at a lovely little hotel on West 46 Street. It’s right next door to St. Mary the Virgin, a beautiful and historic Episcopal church. Often I can hear the Sunday morning church bells from my room.

Once, on a whim, I signed up for a weekly e-newsletter from St. Mary’s. The articles are interesting and well written, and I have been reading them ever since.

The big news this week is that St. Mary’s has hired a new organist, imported from England. According to the newsletter, this new organist is settling in well: He has already applied for a Social Security number, and he has learned to say schlep.

If you’re not a New Yorker, you might be wondering about schlep. It’s a Yiddish word (derived from Middle High German) that means “walk” or “carry,” but with a distinctive New York feel – a sense of moving along, but having a hard time at it. When New Yorkers schlep something (it’s also a transitive verb), they drag or pull or wrestle with it.

New Yorkers use Yiddish without even thinking about it, to the consternation of other Americans who may not know what we’re talking about. (Finagle? kvetch? mentsch?)

I just looked up schlep on Google and was reminded again why it’s the only search engine I ever use. Google delights me by its apparent ability to read my mind (think of all the possible meanings of “St. Mary the Virgin,” but the New York church came up at the top of the hits). And today there was a bonus – a timeline showing the history of schlep in English. Turns out it started to become popular in the 1950s.

Schlep and its Yiddish kin illustrate a writing problem I wrestle with all the time – or, more accurately, several problems: How much information should I provide for my readers?

Let’s say I’m trying to think of an example for a point I’m making. Do I choose one that my readers will instantly recognize – or one I like better which, however, is somewhat obscure? How much explanation should I give my readers? Should I risk insulting them by explaining something obvious – or is it better to just hope they know what I’m talking about?

That newsletter from St. Mary’s didn’t bother defining schlep, but I did. It’s just one example of the decisions that we writers grapple with every time we sit down at our keyboards.

Did that rector at St. Mary’s have a debate with himself before he inserted schlep into his newsletter? We’ll never know – but what a delight for readers to find it there!

Church_of_St._Mary_the_Virgin_145_West_46th_Street ok

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