--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "guestu5er" <guestuser.0x9357@...> wrote:
>
> >My point was not the spelling, but rather that the source is
> >Yiddish, not German.
>
> That was clear. But what's not clear (to people who don't speak
> German) is that many (most of) such cases are plain German words
> and phrases (often belonging to South-German dialect areas),
> and not some kind of remote, exotic kind of Germanic occurrence.
> So is Klotz: each connotation (conveyed to English) is there in
> today's (both vernacular and high-brow) German.
>
This
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeyman_years
is where I would start looking for a transmitting layer in Northern Europe of those expressions. Their lingua franca was German. The language (argot?) of artisans (Handwerker) contains very many German loans in Danish, and AFAIK also in the Slavic languages. 'Gå på valsen' existed in Denmark too (but not in Sweden, AFAIK?). They are the layer to which (West) Germany owes its industrial proficiency (and the removal of them and their workstandard-enforcing rules in the Slavic lands led to the miserable industrial output of those under Communism).
Of course, relabeling these words as Yiddish would help them survive the sentiment against the German language in the USA in WWI.
See also
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/67274
Torsten