Fancy That

As I said a while ago, nearly all the words ending in "-tz" in English are either from Yiddish or German. On the other hand, to best of my knowledge, all but one of the words beginning in "schm-" in English are from Yiddish, not that there are that many of them: "schmear", "schmaltz", "schmoe", "schmuck", "schmutz", "schmatte", "schmendrick", and "schmooze". (The OED lists a couple of others, which are, I think, much less common in English: "schmegeggy" and "schmerz", which is actually German.)

However, "schm-" has another use, and the class of invented words that begin with this is very large, because you just apply it as you need it. It's used in Yiddish--and sometimes in English--to belittle something or reduce its significance, and the way it's used is to make a rhyming pair, joined with a hyphen or a comma, with the new prefix replacing the initial consonant of the original word: "fancy-schmancy", which means "pretentiously fancy", is the most usual formulation in English, but you can make up your own, such as "lawyer, schmawyer", which means, more or less, "He thinks he's a lawyer?"

"Fancy-schmancy" has taken on a life of its own in English; the conjoined twins have been separated, as in this pair of sentences from this Salon.com article about bottled water:

Bottled water is an industry, not a craft. (And even the schmancy European operations are industrial.)

See? It doesn't even need to be "fancy-schmancy" any more: the phrase is so much a part of the language that the second word has the full force and meaning of the entire construction. I like that.