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Donald Trump used a vulgarity to describe Hillary Clinton's loss to President Obama in 2008 Democratic presidential nomination as follows:

Even a race to Obama, she was gonna beat Obama. I don't know who would be worse, I don't know, how could it be worse? But she was going to beat -- she was favored to win -- and she got schlonged, she lost, I mean she lost," Trump said, using a vulgar Yiddish word for a man's penis.

[Source: CNN Politics]

According to Oxford Online Dictionary the word schlong means as a noun:

A man’s penis.

There is neither a definition as a verb nor its verbal usage.

According to Online Etymology Dictionary:

"penis," 1969, from Yiddish shlang, literally "snake." Compare schmuck. As a verb, "to have sex with," by 2005. Related: Schlonged; schlonging.

It does have a verbal usage, but strangely it says it started to be used in 1969. The linked Ngram Viewer seems to support it.

  1. What is its etymology? How did it get its traction? Is the word shlong or sclung related with it?

  2. How vulgar is this word? When a word like f-word is spoken, it gets automatically bleeped, but it didn't when it was spoken by him.

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Yiddish and Middle High German both appeared relatively close together (respectively originating from around the 9th century and 11th century).

During this period the Middle High German word slange (itself originating from Old High German's slango) for serpent or snake evolved to Yiddish's shlang, until eventually it became the Yiddish word schlong we know today.

How did it get it's traction? Because we are a terribly unoriginal group of people, where anything that resembles a man's penis will become a euphemism for it; see: sausage, weiners, one-eyed snake, stick, hose. However, even in slang form I've never encountered "schlonged" before Trump (although you can immediately understand what it means - it's not that creative).

While the word itself isn't too offensive (euphemisms don't tend to be as their original meanings are innocent enough), the intent behind it definitely is in it's blatant sexism. He deliberately uses the word schlonged because we instinctively know what it means while associating it with the schlong Hillary's presumably lacking. Just like when he mentioned she couldn't satisfy her husband, then questioned how could she satisfy a country; this man knows how to use words and phrases that stick in their vulgarity without being particularly vulgar at all.

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  • +1 very good, I wonder if a specific fact, like its usage on a paper or in a TV show, made it popular from the late 60's.
    – user66974
    Commented Dec 23, 2015 at 13:05
  • One possibility is that Jewish Germans rejected Yiddish in an attempt to protect themselves during the Nazi reign, and after the war's end - although Yiddish mostly died out (for obvious reasons) - there was a greater surge of Yiddish literature, music, and emphasis on these people and their culture. Isaac Bashevis Singer, for example, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1978, written completely in Yiddish, and then gave a speech in half English, half Yiddish, putting more limelight onto the unique language.
    – Julia
    Commented Dec 23, 2015 at 13:17

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