>*RR both schlang and shlong are used in US English, but putz in US >English means something  more like "limp dick" i.e. "loser"
Yes, but still... *dick*. {And shlong actually simply means "snake", and
its pronunciation represents Southern German dialects.} Yiddish uses putz,
but its South-German usage wasn't enough: the Romanian neighbor, namely
the Romanian word /putzä/ (which is etymologically probably related to
putium in praeputium, i.e., to Engl. prepuce), was the addition that
determins the semantics "limp dick = loser". Because this is the original
semantics in the figurative usage of the Romanian /putzä/, namely some
(young) man offended as a "sucker; Schlappschwanz; wimp/y" etc. (In
the Bavarian+Austrian dialect Butzl/Butzel/Butzerl, AFAIK, doesn't have
the derogatory/offending connotation as in Yiddish, rather the contrary
(and it's restricted to babies, children). The Yiddish word, that entered
the AE language, must have been "contaminated" with the semantics of
the Romanian putzä (as is, e.g., the East-European folk/country music of
the klezmorim fulla Romanian, esp. Moldavian, songs and dance tunes).
Another Romanian word popular in the US via Yiddish is pastrami (from
Rum. pastramä).
OTOH, of course, neighboring languages must also have played a major
role, since their words for "dick" also have the same meaning (but incl.
that of ... "man", usually used in a derogatory sense).
George