Last night on The Sunday Game, when introducing the scrap between Clare and Limerick players in Thurles Saturday night, presenter Des Cahill suggested that we may perhaps need a new word for schmozzle. This was based I think on the overuse of the word in dealing with large-scale GAA dust-ups. I'm with Des- we should strive for a very flexible vocabulary in describing the world around us. Others have a different relationship with the word schmozzle. Some believe it is the perfect word to capture an impassioned GAAs scrap of more than 6 players. They claim it's a very exact word. What happened in Derrytresk over the winter was clearly not a schmozzle, but the scrap on Saturday maintained that level of organised, forgotten-about-ten-minutes later violence that makes a schmozzle a schmozzle.
Neil Tracy, for instance, was spot on in his definition of a schmozzle on Twitter yesterday:
That really was a textbook schmozzle on the Lim Clare match. Too intense for handbags, not vicious enough for a melee. Textbook. #sundaygame
— Neil Treacy (@neil_treacy) July 15, 2012
So the question is, readers, do we need a new word for schmozzle, or in fact, is schmozzle perfectly apt? Vote here.
