subsequently transferred to English, especially urban northeastern American English, by Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrations from Central and Eastern Europe. It is now known and used by many non-Jewish English speakers, particularly American English. The construction was also adopted in Modern Hebrew usage as a prefix resulting in a derogatory echoic expressive. For example, March 29, 1955 David Ben-Gurion dismissed a United Nations resolution as "Um-Shmum", (U.M. being the UN's Hebrew acronym, ). Ghil'ad Zuckermann wrote: "When an Israeli speaker would like to express his impatience with or disdain for philosophy, s/he can say filosófya-shmilosófya". In German Yiddish the same construction is possible, too, for example: (i.e.: visa permits that have been somehow obtained, possibly below the level of legality). Zuckermann (2009) mentions in this context the Turkic initial m-segment conveying a sense of "and so on" as in the Turkish sentence , literally "magazine '' read:NEGATIVE:PRESENT:3rd person singular", i.e. "(He) doesn’t read magazines, journals or anything like that". A similar phenomenon is present in most of the languages of the Balkan sprachbund, especially in colloquial Bulgarian where not only "sh(m)-" and "m-", but also other consonants and consonant clusters are used in this way, and its usage has its particularities that differ from what the English 'shm' indicates. As a counterexample in linguistics Shm-reduplication has been advanced as an example of a natural-language phenomenon that cannot be captured by a context-free grammar. The essential argument was that the reduplication can be repeated indefinitely, producing a sequence of phrases of geometrically increasing length, which cannot occur in a context-free language. See also Inherently funny word Joe Shmoe Reduplication Redundancy Pig Latin Spoonerisms Nilsson Schmilsson Rainforest Shmainforest Notes and references Feinsilver, Lillian Mermin. "On Yiddish Shm-". American Speech 36 (1961): 302–3. Nevins, Andrew and Bert Vaux. "Metalinguistic, Shmetalinguistic: The phonology of shm-reduplication". Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society annual meeting, April 2003. Southern, Mark. Contagious Couplings: Transmission of Expressives in Yiddish Echo Phrases. Westport: Greenwood, 2005. Spitzer, Leo. "Confusion Shmooshun". Journal of English and Germanic Philology 51 (1952): 226–33. Shm-reduplication in Russian language Infixes English language Yiddish culture Phonology Reduplication