Quinsies and schmucks R Us

As well as viral meningitis, I also suffered recently (in my head only, you understand- I have no truck with clinics or hospitals) from a quinsy. This is a peritonsillar abscess, a rare complication of strep throat since antibiotics, but one which helped kill George Washington, along with his doctors' treatments.

You can find spectacular photos of tonsillitis and quinsies at this ENT specialist's website. If you like that sort of thing, which I sometimes do.

My already overactive imagination was pushed along the quinsy path when a bowl of hot and sour soup (food and medicine in one bowl) and a few glasses of wine brought on a feeling of parasthesia and swelling in my inflamed throat. This was hardly surprising, since the point of the exercise was to sterilise the area. But soon afterwards the homunculus in my sensory cortex grew an enormous ballooned uvula, flapping about in the back of my reddened, oedematous throat, and my speech became slathery and muffled. "Hot potato speech" is one of the clinical signs of a quinsy, of course, but was in my case due to wine and chilli, which by morning had worked their antiseptic magic.



I secretly wanted my quinsy for the quirky mediaeval-sounding word, lining up with other ancient maladies dropsy, palsy and apoplexy. Online Etymology finds quinsy in the 13th century, derived from a classical Greek term for 'dog-collar'. A fitting characterisation of an abscess that prevents eating, drinking, swallowing and can progress to epiglottitis and tracheal obstruction. Strangulation indeed.

While I'm on etymology, online etymology disagrees with Philip at the Curmudgeon about the origin of the Yiddish shmuck, a curse-word meaning 'dick' (penis pejorative).

Philip identified schmuck with the same German word meaning 'jewellery' (connotation 'hoard'), while the OE derivation places Yiddisher schmuck as a Slavic loan word meaning 'grass-snake or dragon'. Philip's derivation possesses the charm of Jewish mamas adoring their sons' tackle, but OE may be more in keeping with the cultural and semiotic characteristics of Yiddish shmuck, which is pejorative rather than affectionate. One could also speculate that vowel shifts of Yiddish should have flattened Germanic schmuck to something else.

More on Yiddish, its Germanic, Hebrew, Romance and Slavic influences and vowel shifts, and Ashkenazi migrations at wikipedia, encyclopedia.com and jewishvirtuallibrary.