Jonathon Green explores Yiddish's relationship to slang:
Like Yiddish, slang is the great lexis of the put-down, the bitch and the moan. Of the Yiddish terms that populate contemporary slang, a good many derive from sex, especially the penis, and more particularly those words, just like mainstream prick or dork, where words for the male member serve a double role and also mean the fool: shmuck putz schmeckel or yutz. And dominating the rest? The Inuit do not, popular belief notwithstanding, have an especially wide-ranging list of synonyms for snow. But Yiddish undoubtedly knows a fool, and the gradations thereof: shlub, shloomp, shmo, shlemiehl, schlimazel, schmendrick…
The Dish 