Schpiel (Spiel)

Pronunciation: SHPEEL
Definition: a generally long story or speech.
Example Sentence: Ugh, stop the schpiel. I don’t want any of your stupid girl scout cookies. Don’t cry… okay… fine… I’ll buy three boxes of Samoas and maybe two Thin Mints. And a thing of Trefoils.

Here’s the schpiel:

Want to talk about spelling? Me neither, but we’re going to because I was really interested in how this word is spelled based on context. So from what I could find, the word is generally spelled as “Spiel,” deriving from its German root, spielen, meaning to play music (think glockenspiel). Now, some dictionaries sighted spiel (pronounced SPEEL) as the German spelling, while insisting that schpiel (pronounced as written above, with that characteristic SH found in so many Yiddish words) is the Yiddish spelling. I couldn’t decide which to put, so I put both because I saw spiel used on many Jewish websites as well.

What is really cool is how a language evolves and how cultural language is. Yiddish shares so much with German, but it uses a completely different alphabet (for those that don’t know, Yiddish traditionally uses the Hebrew alphabet)! And we are discussing the spelling of Yiddish words and trying to make them conform to an English spelling. It’s all fascinating to me, but all of this semantic ruminating is another schpiel and I won’t get into it.