Schvantz
There exist euphemisms that, while limning the lewd, offer themselves up on a different plane: that of verbal delectation. Compared with dick, schlong, johnson, willy and so many more, shvantz offers something almost serene and glowing, perhaps recalling Weinberger's Schwanda the Bagpiper or the elegant skater's curve cut on the water by Sibelius's swan. This applies equally to such variants as schvantz, schvanz, schwantz, schwanz, schvontz, shvonce and shvuntz. The hilarious contortion envisaged in the idiom step on the (your) shvantz, displacing step on it and step on the gas, evokes what used to be called the anatomical impossibility: go fuck yourself. Add to this innovation the military version of the phrase, meaning to blunder, commit a snafu, and you gain some idea of the verbal Laocöon that someone cussing can become entangled with. It has been said that, without the Jewish passion for reading, there would no longer be any serious literary culture left in the United States. By a similar token, without Yiddish, there would be a dearth of saliva-spraying, mildly-obliterative words and phrases of condemnation. Moral: Those who read know how to damn.
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