yiddish, anyone?

i don't know if my hebrew teacher would be pleased today or not. she was from jerusalem and told us to stop complaining that this language was "backwards". "what if english is backwards?" she would exclaim, followed by an exasperated, "ay!"
what i can say after her class is "moses went up the mountain" and "the king took the queen's horse". but, more often than not, it comes out as "kings walked up to the donkeys" and "the lady took moses' hill land." sigh. it's harder than it looks.
what got me thinking about all this? the word "schlepp". i love saying it lately for some reason. schlepp, schlepp, schlepp. and, remembering a keenly humbling lesson in third grade about not using words if i don't fully know what they mean, i thought i should look it up.
schlepp, transitive verb to carry, take, haul or drag. origin: yiddish shlepn, middle german sleppen. intransitive verb to go or move with effort, drag oneself. noun an ineffectual person.
then of course, i had to look up "yiddish" because i realized i didn't really know what that meant in the truest sense of etymology either.
i discovered that yiddish is actually a mix of german, hebrew, aramaic and slavic with traces of romance languages. it is written with the hebrew alphabet and wasn't termed "yiddish" until the 18th century.
there you have it. the word of the day sponsored by wordnest. and now that i've learned not one but two new things today, i don't feel like such a schlepp.