schmendrick

schmendrick

slang A foolish, bumbling, or incompetent person. From Yiddish. With the way they keep mismanaging the company, it's starting to feel like I'm working for a bunch of schmendricks. Jeff is managing the project? That schmendrick couldn't manage his own sock drawer.
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

schmendrick

and shmendrick (ˈʃmɛndrɪk)
n. a stupid and ineffectual nobody. (Yiddish.) Some schmendrick from downstairs asked if you could turn down your stereo.
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See also:
  • shmendrick
  • jack-off
  • schlemiel
  • schlemihl
  • shlemiel
  • fish
  • klutz
  • klotz
  • lughead
  • schtoonk
References in periodicals archive
While Cully's illusion is brutally shattered by Schmendrick's magic, Mommy's and Haggard's punishment for the crime of usurping reign over immortality, and imperishable beauty in the case of unicorns, is death.
The final step in the process of reduction is Unicorn's complete alteration: Schmendrick commits one of the most horrible deeds in the entire book--he traps an immortal soul in a mortal body.
Unicorn is saved only thanks to the human body she is given by Schmendrick. Since the Bull represents the desire for immortal purity and beauty, he is not interested in Amalthea's human body-a mortal body which can be tainted.
"I would pair Schmendrick (from Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn) and Susan Sto Helit (from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series).
Schmendrick and Susan contrast and complement each other.
Being a pale, translucent, unphotosynthesized schmendrick didn't matter as long as you were smart and funny."
Along the way she meets a magician named Schmendrick, a barmaid named Molly, and a cast of characters who cannot seem to recognize what the creature truly is beyond merely a beautiful horse.
Characters are aptly named, such as Schmendrick, the bumbling fool, or Haggard, the old and weary king.
During the late '60s and early '70s, one of the riddles to the universe was how in the heck someone like the world-class schmendrick Henry Kissinger could be seen with a bevy of beautiful women on his arm, including Jill St.
Rhys Meyers will play Schmendrick the Magician in the movie along with a host of Hollywood superstars, including Christopher Lee and Angela Lansbury.
He did not call any of them a chazzer, chutzpenik, draikop, ganef, k'vatsh, nudnik, ongeblozzener, oysvurf, potzevateh, pustunpasnik, schmendrick, shikker, shlub, shmegegi, shmok, shnook, traifnyak, trombenik, yold, yukel, zhlob or zhulik (terms of endearment he apparently reserved for melt), and indeed Yale expressed the greatest respect and affection for those who engaged him in these rhetorical rhubarbs.
Since I daylight as a pedagogue, getting into heavy textual discussions with any schmendrick who can get into a seminar, my ethical high road has more than a slight odor of the world's oldest profession.
Along the way to Haggard's territory, the unicorn is joined by Schmendrick, a bumbling magician working for a witch's sideshow, and Molly Grue, the ex-girlfriend of a Robin Hood-wannabe.
Yet Haggard's relationship to the Bull is complex, because his relationship to death is complex, as demonstrated by Schmendrick's attempt to describe it:
According to Schmendrick, "the land was green and soft once, before Haggard came, but he touched it and it withered" (4:42).