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Comment by shortlived | Hacker News Reader

    Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed    
    into general use in the US. It means a tedious,     
    unpleasant task.

Interesting linguistic tangent. I'm curious where you encountered schlep as a noun. My experience and various dictionaries define it as a verb ("to schlep"). E.g. "Oy vey. Do we really have to schlep over at this hour?"

Maybe it was just artistic license.

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You clearly haven't hung out with my grandmother. Schlep can definitely be used as a noun, and commonly is by native Yiddish speakers. (As in "Oy! What a shlep!" or "Picking you up during rush hour would be a shlep, how about you just take the bus?")

There's a natural tendency in English to use as nouns words that were originally verbs. Examples: I'm going for a walk. I'm having a talk with someone.

Dictionary definition or not, a google search for the phrase "a schlep" returns >60,000 results.

If the (recently added) part-of-speech tagging on Google Books is accurate, the chronology is the other way around: it used to be equally used as a noun and verb, but sometime in the 1990s the verb form became dominant: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=schlep_VERB%2Cs...

A "gerund" is a noun that has "ing" added to it and is used as a verb.

The other way around. From Wikipedia:

As applied to English, it refers to the use of a verb (in its -ing form) as a noun (for example, the verb "learning" in the sentence "Learning is an easy process for some").

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