{"id":12276,"date":"2009-03-26T08:30:31","date_gmt":"2009-03-26T08:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wordswarm.net\/dictionary\/schlemiel.html"},"modified":"2009-03-26T08:30:31","modified_gmt":"2009-03-26T08:30:31","slug":"schlemiel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2009\/03\/26\/schlemiel.html","title":{"rendered":"Schlemiel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"width\"><font face=\"arial,helvetica\">A&nbsp;dolt who is a habitual bungler.<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nMy earliest memories of the <cite>Laverne and Shirley<\/cite> television show are overshadowed by the disdain my mother held for it. She felt that this show portrayed the era of Milwaukee in the 1950s in a cloying, condescending manner, and that the cast were insulting caricatures of the people &#8212; the women in particular &#8212; from that era.<\/p>\n<p>Because of this I rarely watched the show, and my few memories of <cite>Laverne and Shirley<\/cite> mostly involve the show&#8217;s theme song. I rarely saw the full one-plus-minute opening to that show because someone summarily changed the channel or turned the TV off as soon as the show started.<\/p>\n<p>I felt like I was hearing something forbidden, then, when a Tampa radio station (in what it described as a bold programming move) played the <cite>Laverne and Shirley<\/cite> theme song on the radio. Playing television music on the radio seemed mildly revolutionary to me, my impressions likely influenced by the way the DJ presented it. I imagined this was a new frontier of for radio programming, and from then on through the 1980s I kept an eye out for television theme songs on the radio. I had a notion that the words &#8221; Schlemeel, schlimazel&#8221; had ushered in a golden age of television show theme songs and had revived interest in theme songs for <cite>Hawaii Five-0<\/cite> and the contemporaneous <cite>Rockford Files<\/cite>.<\/p>\n<p>Without researching the pop culture trends of television show theme music I suspect that my notions about this &#8220;golden age&#8221; are bunk, influenced by the former influence of radio station airplay and the artificial prestige it generated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A&nbsp;dolt who is a habitual bungler. &nbsp; &nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whats-the-word","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-3c0","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}