Mary Schmuck, who is 72, first came to my attention last summer, when the Los Angeles Jewish Journal published a letter she wrote taking issue with the title of the recent film Dinner for Schmucks, and asked the newspaper’s readers—many of whom she thought (not incorrectly) might be associated in some manner with the film industry—for “awareness and sensitivity to various audiences out here.” I was moved by her pride, and I was also surprised to learn that there are actual Americans named Schmuck.

“At one point, there were 400 Schmucks in America,” she told me. “I’ve done some genealogy research on this.” She does not know the number of Schmucks in America today, however. “Whenever I go to another city, I look in the White Pages for Schmucks, but I don’t run across any.” In our conversation, I suggested, in a kindly way, that her mission to expunge the word schmuck from the American lexicon of insults was quixotic: Yiddish, particularly its more flamboyant expressions, has penetrated the American vernacular as much as the bagel has come to dominate the American breakfast table. “Yes, that may be so,” she said. “But human dignity is important. I think people should find another word to insult people with, or better yet, not insult one another at all.”

I noted to Sister Mary that hers is not the only challenging surname in America. June Putz, Thomas Putz, Cornelia Putz, Erik Putz, Wolfgang Putz—indeed, an apparently unending procession of people named Putz—are listed on Facebook, and seem emotionally whole (to the extent that one can assess such things online). “Schmuck seems to be a very popular insulting term, though,” Sister Mary noted, correctly.

How schmuck came to be a rude word for part of the male genitalia is not as obvious as one might think. Both Sister Mary and I thought the nether-region connotation of schmuck derived from the notion that the male genitals represent “the family jewels,” but according to the lexicographer Michael Wex, a top-tier Yiddishist and the author of How to Be a Mentsh (And Not a Shmuck), the Yiddish and German schmucks are completely unrelated.

“Basically, the Yiddish word comes out of baby talk,” Wex said. “A little boy’s penis is a shtekl, a ‘little stick.’ Shtekl became shmeckle, in a kind of baby-rhyming thing, and shmeckle became shmuck. Shmeckle is prepubescent and not a dirty word, but shmuck, the non-diminutive, became obscene.”

Sister Mary said she does not blame Yiddish for the unhappiness it has caused her: in part because the unhappiness has been mitigated by her return several years ago to Kentucky, where she devotes her life to serving impoverished people, who are grateful for her attention and unaware of her name’s connotations; in part because she is vocationally forgiving; and in part because she has a predisposition toward Jews, and not only Jesus.