I’m beginning to wonder whether the Donald Trump campaign is going to eventually eclipse the Sokal Hoax in the annals of performance art created for the sake of testing the outer limits of Poe’s Law. Then again, maybe he really means all of it. Either way, are you not entertained? He keeps giving us so much to laugh and think about.
Once again, #MSM is dishonest. "Schlonged" is not vulgar. When I said Hillary got "schlonged" that meant beaten badly.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2015
Maybe it’s vulgar, maybe it’s not. We’re going to need a judge’s ruling on this one. Thankfully, there is the case of LYLE, v. WARNER BROTHERS TELEVISION PRODUCTIONS, a sexual harassment suit about “sexually coarse, vulgar and demeaning language in the workplace.”
Reich frequently commented on his encounters with oral sex and how he wanted “someone who could give him a good blow job.” He regularly used the word “schlong” which Lyle knew was a Yiddish word for penis. He would talk about “schlonging this and schlonging that.” When Reich and the other writers were working on a script for a New Year’s episode Reich kept referring to “schlonging in the New Year” and using “schlong” in every other sentence. Reich would also pretend to masturbate while walking around the writers’ room and while sitting at his desk.
Okay, so maybe it only counts as vulgar slang in that particular context. Probably we should look for a few other usages.
“By the way, who you schlonging?” continued Owen, just in time to stop the uncomfortable silence from levitating the reading matter on his desk.
Halloween Ooga-Ooga Ooum, pg. 167
In this context, “schlonging” means basically the same thing as “screwing” or “fucking” but presumably it falls somewhere between the two on the subjective vulgarity scale. Instances of this particular usage are relatively abundant in fiction.
The most poetically sacrilegious use of the term shows up in The Van Zanzibar testaments: Being an historical record of Dr. Hugo Maximilian Van Zanzibar’s resonance therapeutic researches of the lives of Moses and Jesus of Nazareth which has just now been added to my Christmas wish list.
“I’m hard times Mary and I never had a cherry
I’ve been riddled, fiddled, piddled and diddled
I’ve been wronged, pronged, donged and schlonged
I’ve been bad-lucked, fucked, schmucked and sucked
I’ve been hauled, mauled, crawled, and balled,
I’ve been yanged, pranged, ganged, and banged,
I’ve been teamed, creamed, reamed, and I’m un-redeemed!”
(They say that poetry is what gets lost in translation, but I’d still love to see what this passage looks like in German.)
After extensive combing through the schlong-related literature, I finally came across a usage which more-or-less matches what Trump was trying to convey:
“How about if we recruit a few guys from the crew, I’ll go on stage and make an announcement about how we’re gonna get schlonged by lettin’ everybody in ahead of time, and these guys can pass a basket around the audience for contributions.
Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969, pg. 245 (italics in original)
Once again “schlonged” seems to be interchangeable with “screwed” or “fucked” but this time in the sense of getting a raw deal or suffering a major setback, rather than in the literal sexual sense. This naturally sets me to wondering about the attitudes and life experiences of whomever first thought it was a good idea to link the act of sex with the concept of suffering humiliation and defeat. Presumably, they would not have been healthy attitudes and positive experiences.
Which brings us back to Trump. We can be minimally charitable and say that he meant something akin to “Hillary got screwed” in the 2008 primary campaign, but we might not be so charitable as to infer that he did not intend to convey even a hint of sexual humiliation by invoking this particular idiom. This is, after all, Donald Trump we are talking about, so adjust your priors accordingly.
